Music of the Earth
David Longstreth, Soiled Projectors, and s t a r g a z e
New Amsterdam / Nonesuch
4 April 2025
As floodwaters rise and we “Stroll the Edge”, Music of the Earth emerges as a reckoning. David Longstreth’s current album is an bold 24-part tune cycle for voice and orchestra, carried out with Soiled Projectors and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e. These collaborators convey a sweeping scale to the album, whereas a slate of visitor contributors brings emotional depth. For instance, Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Ayoni, and Anastasia Coope broaden the document’s thematic and musical arc. At its core, Music of the Earth is a distinction research that musically portrays the environment as a world teetering between destruction and sweetness.
Music of the Earth will get its identify from Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Music of the Earth) and additionally attracts inspiration from David Wallace-Wells’ e-book, The Uninhabitable Earth. Each are becoming subtexts, because the symphony and the textual content painting magnificence and decay juxtaposed to the vulnerability of life on Earth. But, even with these influences, Longstreth contends that Music of the Earth is just not a “local weather change opera“.
This declare, nonetheless, creates stress, if not a contradiction. In the identical assertion, David Longstreth emphasizes the album’s deal with steadiness, referencing the pandemic period when he fled wildfire-ravaged California for refuge in Alaska. Whereas he avoids making the album’s singular topic, local weather change, Music of the Earth dwells within the stress that local weather change creates.
This stress surfaces in songs like “Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One“. The tracks come instantly from Wallace-Wells’ textual content, layering the studying over swirling strings and ominous brass. The result’s a foreboding soundscape. The lyrics decry “an anthology of comforting delusions”. Longstreth is restricted; these delusions embody the widespread perception that international warming solely impacts coastlines or that the environmental disaster is “of the ‘pure world / Not the human one”. The refrain creates urgency because the lyrics repeat, “None of that is true”. On this mild, Music of the Earth resists the classification as a simple commentary on local weather change. As an alternative, it depicts a fancy emotional terrain the place disaster and hope are in dialogue.
Music of the Earth has moments of softness and even optimism. The tune “Blue of Dreaming”, a lullaby David Longstreth wrote for his new child daughter, is tender. Likewise, “At Residence” is playful and vivid, its language rooted in meals and progress. The references to “beans”, “maize”, and “squash” evoke the Three Sisters planting custom. A way derived from Native agriculture that emphasizes intercropping or symbiotic crop assist. Longstreth makes use of the custom as a delicate however profound name for coexistence and mutual care. Right here, Music of the Earth positions vulnerability as a depleted useful resource.
All through the album, Longstreth makes use of colour as an emblem. In “Blue of Dreaming”, the repeated line “that’s the blue of dreaming” turns the colour into an emblem of hope and creativeness. Right here, dreaming is just not an escape; it’s an area to ascertain a flourishing world, a world our present actuality denies. It’s this disconnect between our dreaming and awakening states that influences our anxiousness.
In “Circled in Purple”, the colour alerts catastrophe. “The map circled in purple / The map encircled in purple mild. It evokes imagery of climate maps that use purple circles to point out larger precipitation ranges, resulting in flooding. Later, David Longstreth makes use of purple as an example emotional confusion: “It feels so proper to be right here on the finish of the availability chain / It feels improper / Makes me really feel alone / I need to cry.” The lyrics seize the contradiction of consolation amid collapse, upsetting listeners to ask, “why aren’t we reordering our lives identical day?”
In response, the document explores how we try to regain our steadiness. Tracks like “Financial institution On” and “Gimme Bread” replicate the affect of post-industrial pop and noise, genres that provided societal critique by means of dissonant sound. “Financial institution On” merges aggressive brass and rhythmic dissonance with lyrics disavowing extractive capitalism. Whereas the imagery in “Gimme Bread” is stark. Strains like “Everyone seems to be gasoline / Gimme bread“ fuse extra consumerism with unmet wants. The repetition of “We would like bread…Gimme bread“ echoes the resistance actions decrying shortage and starvation.
Music of the Earth is just not a standard album within the present single-dominant streaming period. There are not any sing-along choruses or catchy hooks, and the entire runtime requires dedication. But, it is an interesting musical expertise as every re-listen reveals its innovation, creativity, and nuanced moments of resistance. Music of the Earth is daring and honest; it’s a creative assertion enshrining David Longstreth’s musical versatility.
