About this Event

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How do you write a soundtrack for the end of the world? Melancholy synthpop group POLIÇA collaborate with Berlin-based contemporary chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e to ponder just that question.



They find their inspiration for this project in James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, a book exploring the looming catastrophes of modernity – bioterrorism, economic instability and, chiefly, what happens when we run out of oil. And the effects are dizzying: an incessant pulse underpins bewildering electronic textures suggesting a world on the brink, while orchestral swells recall desolate open spaces. But throughout this ominous environment there’s the otherworldly voice of POLIÇA’s Channy Leaneagh, projecting optimism and enduring humanity in the face of disaster.



Music for the Long Emergency has its roots in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, which brought together Poliça and s t a r g a z e, led by conductor Andre de Ridder, for a ‘virtual residency’; the two ensembles embarking on a creative journey while halfway across the globe from each other. It’s a truly collaborative project, not just ‘POLIÇA songs with s t a r g a z e pasted on top,’ as Leaneagh puts it. ‘We really wanted to maintain this conversation back and forth, and be a new version of both POLIÇA and s t a r g a z e.’ The result is an album of original material, Music for the Long Emergency – a strangely beautiful, hopeful reaction to impending calamity.



A Barbican presentation in collaboration with Rockfeedback