Album of the Week: Dimensional Stardust ⁠— Rob Mazurek / We Will Always Love You — The Avalanches

This week’s Album of the Week show features the spacey inter-dimensional sounds of both American jazz legend Rob Mazurek, and the long-awaited latest release from the Avalanches.

Rob Mazurek has released a space exploration that blends jazz improvisation, sampling and electronic production on his latest release Dimensional Stardust. The album is a journey and when listened beginning to end, reads more as a short story than a piece of standalone music. The album features the fantastic Exploding Star Orchestra with the notable Nicole Mitchell on flutes, as well as of course Rob Mazurek himself on the trumpets. One of the more orchestral tracks on this release is ‘Autumn Pleiades’ swimming through a string composition, whereas ‘Minerals Bionic Stereo’ dives straight into a modern jazz cacophony of sound. Overall a wildly successful foray into what it means to blend classical jazz training with modern composition and production.

The Avalanches burst onto the Australian music scene in 2000 with a sound that had never been heard before, a wild mix of thousands of samples found by digging through record crates throughout Melbourne and Sydney. After a sixteen-year hiatus, and the loss of their founding member the band released another showstopping release, somehow updating their sound to fit with what was happening on the modern airwaves. We Will Always Love You is the band’s third release, and the classic sample-heavy retro Avalanches sound remains strong. This release features dozens of artists, both local and international: ranging from The Clashes Mick Jones, to MGMT and Leon Bridges. The sounds in this album take you through a space odyssey of disco and ambient sound, leaving the listener with a feeling of peace and joy. It is best listened to in full, on a sunny Sunday morning dancing around the kitchen.

Listen back to the show here, and tune in Wednesdays 3-4pm to hear Album of the Week with Bec Cushway.