Astral Pastorales: Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra

Description

The Astral Pastorales is a large-scale suite composed by Rob Mazurek and performed by Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra that unfolds as a celestial pastorale—an expansive sonic landscape where composition, improvisation, electronics, and spoken word merge into a single evolving field. This work is composed in-residence at Yerkes Observatory specifically for presentation in their awe-inspiring refractor telescope dome on October 2 and 3 (October 3 is sold out). 

Moving between luminous textures, deep rhythmic currents, and moments of open-ended sonic space, Astral Pastorales evokes a kind of cosmic ecology—music that imagines the pastorale not as earthly nostalgia but as a vast astral terrain shaped through the orchestra’s restless creativity and shared exploration of sound, image, and mythic atmosphere, informed by research that Mazurek and the orchestra will conduct at Yerkes Observatory.

Co-produced by Experimental Sound Studio and Instigation Festival

Line-up

Rob Mazurek – compositions, trumpets, bells
Damon Locks – voice, samplers
Jason Adasiewicz – vibraphone
Kalia Vandever – trombone, electronics
Mikel Patrick Avery – drums, percussion
Steve Marquette – guitar
Tomeka Reid – cello
Victor Vieira Branco – vibraphone

About

Rob Mazurek is a multidisciplinary artist/abstractivist, with a focus on electro-acoustic composition, improvisation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, film, and installation, who spent much of his creative life in Chicago, and then Brazil. He currently lives and works in Marfa, Texas.

Exploding Star Orchestra
Over the past two decades, Exploding Star Orchestra (ESO) has become one of the most significant large-ensemble projects in contemporary creative music. The first iteration of the orchestra was assembled by trumpeter and composer Rob Mazurek as a 14-member ensemble that encapsulated the breadth of Chicago’s improvised music community, bringing together musicians from across multiple threads of the city’s avant-garde jazz scene. What began as a special project quickly developed into a central means of expression for Mazurek’s restless creativity: a widescreen platform through which his celestial explorations in composition, improvisation, electronics, and collective sound could unfold.

Since its first appearance in 2005 at Chicago’s Millennium Park, the orchestra has evolved into a living constellation of musicians. While Chicago artists have remained central to its identity, dozens of players from around the world have worked with the group, creating a veritable cross-section of 21st-century jazz and improvised music. ESO functions less like a traditional big band than a creative family—a collective in which musicians may move between projects yet remain part of an ongoing orbit.

Across its recordings and large-scale suites, the orchestra has significantly shaped the language of modern experimental music. Early releases such as Stars Have Shapes (2007) introduced the ensemble’s expansive approach to orchestration and improvisation, blending AACM-influenced creative music traditions with electronics, cosmic imagery, and open collective form. The monumental triple-album Galactic Parables (2015) expanded that vision further, presenting a sweeping narrative work that fused large-ensemble improvisation with mythic and Afrofuturist themes, and demonstrating how contemporary orchestral music could operate as a fluid, collaborative sound ecosystem.

Subsequent projects continued to deepen the orchestra’s influence. Dimensional Stardust (2020) revealed a refined, luminous ensemble language—interweaving electronics, chamber-like textures, and collective improvisation into a work that many critics recognized as one of the defining large-ensemble recordings of its era. Meanwhile, Live at the Adler Planetarium (2024, produced by Experimental Sound Studio) captured the orchestra performing beneath the cosmic environment of Chicago’s iconic astronomical observatory, reinforcing Mazurek’s ongoing dialogue between sound, space, and celestial imagination.

Through these recordings and the many musicians who have passed through its ranks, Exploding Star Orchestra has helped redefine what a 21st-century creative orchestra can be: flexible, intergenerational, globally connected, and grounded in collective exploration. By bridging Chicago’s avant-garde lineage with new compositional strategies, deep research, and an ever-expanding community of improvisers, ESO has become both a platform for evolving sonic cosmology and a crucial catalyst for contemporary creative music worldwide.