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Mar 27, 2017 James McAlister By Christopher Roberts

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Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner (of The National), and James McAlister have all teamed up for a new collaborative album, Planetarium, and shared a song from it, “Saturn,” via its video. Below is the tracklist and the video.

The project started several years ago when Dutch concert hall Muziekgebouw Eindhoven commissioned Muhly to compose a new piece and he asked his friends Stevens, Dessner, and McAlister to collaborate on it. Stevens and McAlister took the live recordings and adapted them into a studio recording. “We had recorded all the arrangements and the live parts in a studio after our last performance,” says Stevens in a press release. “So years later when we all kind of settled down, we said, ‘let’s open Pandora’s box.’”

The press release describes the album as such: “Planetarium unites Stevens’ vocals, McAlister’s beats, Dessner’s guitar performance, and Muhly’s instrumental compositions-part rock odyssey, part electronic experiment, part classical opus…. Conceptually, Planetarium revolves around the cosmic ideas Stevens’ lyrics explore: mythology, astrology, science, astronomy and the intricacies of human consciousness.”

Planetarium Tracklist:

1. Neptune
2. Jupiter
3. Halley’s Comet
4. Venus
5. Uranus
6. Mars
7. Black Energy
8. Sun
9. Tides
10. Moon
11. Pluto
12. Kuiper Belt
13. Black Hole
14. Saturn
15. In the Beginning
16. Earth
17. Mercury

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