Early praise for Music For The Long Emergency:
"'How Is This Happening'...opens like a maudlin sunrise...the nerve that Trump's election exposed is clear here, delivered with a breathy, weary and pastoral lament. The piece quickly begins to undulate into its center zone; a dystopic oscillation, weeping sweep of strings and deeply pained chorus of French horn." - NPR Music (Songs We Love)
"The result is jarring and full of dissonance, a reflection of how we felt then and the sobering realization that that feeling hasn't really gone away since." - Stereogum
"['How Is This Happening'] has Channy's unmistakable voice paired with more experimental, meditative music than POLIÇA do on their own, and it works really well." - Brooklyn Vegan
"The opening orchestral arrangement [on 'Agree'] lures you in before it hits a crescendo of drums. By the time the song hits the one-minute mark, you're knee-deep in haunting lyrics." - Billboard
Minneapolis-based electronic quintet POLIÇA and European orchestral collective s t a r g a z e will release their debut collaborative album Music For The Long Emergency on February 16th. Today they share the stunning visuals for the second single from the record, "Agree," which depict the journey of two outlaws and culminate in an event that cements their fates into an eternal love. "['Agree'] felt like a song for a lover," says director and editor Maria Juranic, "There seemed to be a push and pull in the lyrics, which inspired the idea of a dangerous relationship like the one of the outlaws." Watch the video for "Agree" now.
POLIÇA and s t a r g a z e will take their collaboration on the road starting next week for a limited run of dates that includes stops in New York, POLIÇA's hometown Minneapolis, and Chicago. Full dates listed below--get your tickets HERE.
Introduced via the Liquid Music project run by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in Minnesota, with the hope of a cross-genre collaboration, POLIÇA and s t a r g a z e first met in Berlin in 2016 in s t a r g a z e conductor André de Ridder's living room. While the collaboration started in the same room, the process continued as an 18-month long "ping pong" match as the bands exchanged ideas and music over email, mp3 files, video conferencing, and the occasional meet-up in Berlin, Minneapolis, and Eau Claire. Both bands were adamant that whatever they created "not just be POLIÇA songs with s t a r g a z e pasted on top," as POLIÇA vocalist Channy Leaneagh puts it, and the end result is the most adventurous and forward-thinking music either group has made to date.
Lyrically, this is in many ways an album of tensions — of sorrow and intense joy, of beauty and confusion. "It's about those contradictions in life," Leaneagh says. "How you can be going through tragedy, never-ending wars, but you still also are dealing with human relationships and love and romantic troubles." It is a reflection of the strange and sudden darkening of our times. "Everybody in s t a r g a z e and POLIÇA is a little older. I grew up in a time in America that was before the internet, in a time when the schools in America were the least segregated that they'd ever been. In a time when we had turned towards progress after the era of Jim Crow, and lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan. And we're back in that right now in America. And in a lot of places in Europe too. We had our hands on progress and then it flipped. So the songs deal with that, lyrically, and musically they do too — with the idea that we're still human beings and we’re trying to find happiness and the love of our lives, or a career to be happy about, but then we're also trying to find world peace and end racism."
For both bands, this record is "an example of the truly healing effects of making music with your friends," says Leaneagh. "And while it doesn’t necessarily make things better, it builds community." Music For The Long Emergency will be released on February 16th via Totally Gross National Product/Transgressive. Pre-order the album HERE.
Tour dates:
2/15 - North Adams, MA @ MASS MoCA
2/17 - New York, NY @ Symphony Space at Peter Jay Sharp Theatre
2/18 - Portsmouth, NH @ 3S Artspace *
2/19 - Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall *
2/21 - Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
2/22 - Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall
2/23 - Cincinnati, OH @ Contemporary Arts Center
2/27 - London, UK @ Oval Space
3/1 - Rotterdam, NL @ Cross-Linx Festival
3/2 - Amsterdam, NL @ Cross-Linx Festival
3/3 - Eindhoven, NL @ Cross-Linx Festival
3/4 - Enschede, NL @ Cross-Linx Festival
* solo POLIÇA show