Music For The Long Emergency

POLIÇA and s t a r g a z e first met in person in February 2016 in the Berlin living room of the conductor and 'leader' of musical collective s t a r g a z e, André de Ridder. The two bands talked and the s t a r g a z e musicians began to improvise -- strings, brass, woodwind played over a handful of song sketches brought by Ryan Olson of POLIÇA.

"They were not even song structures, just electronic textures," de Ridder says. "And we started playing over them. But it was so important that the starting point was in the same room," de Ridder adds. "Because we could see how their faces lit up when we played. I guess that's where our minds met."

Olson recorded the Berlin improvisations and incorporated them into several tracks he sent to the s t a r g a z e collective a few weeks later. Coming together again in October 2016 to prepare for a week-long residency culminating in a festival at the Funkhaus in Berlin, the players wrote, rehearsed, and developed the ideas they had been pinging back and forth via the internet.

The resultant album feels more than a simple collaboration, something more than a sum of its parts, a record with its own unique life force and distinctive voice. For de Ridder, the album's title, Music For The Long Emergency, reflects the confusion of the times.

"It had a meaning of music being a haven, giving you a ray of hope," says de Ridder. "An alternative reality. And that became a theme of the music too. Quite a lot of the music is a little dark, and it does reflect what has been going on, but also incredible beauty at the same time which we hung onto because we needed to."