“4 STARS. 2013 UNDERGROUND ALBUM OF THE YEAR: Harnetty and band weave melancholy threads of music-box celesta, piano, flute, cello and clarinet through warped reels of Ra philosophy and instruction. The end result is peculiarly intimate and beautiful, a drifting dialogue between past and present in the smoke-filled rec room of the orbiting Arkestra space station.” — Andrew Male, Mojo Magazine

“Harnetty has approached this stuff with the same surety that marked his earlier work... Harnetty was able to approach the archive with ears wide open, looking only for sounds and words that he knew would work. And they do.” — Byron Coley, The Wire

The Star-Faced One is an album-length version of a 2010 sound installation based on the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection of the Creative Audio Archive in Chicago. It was commissioned with the generous support of the Experimental Sound Studio. It features performances from Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jeff Kimmel, and Jeremy Woodruff, among others.

“Brian Harnetty’s The Star-Faced One travels the peculiarities and particularities of a collection of interplanetary fragment-gems: the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection in the Creative Audio Archive at ESS. His excursion into this unsystematic cache of rehearsal tapes, recitations, studio recordings, concert documents, and unlabeled appropriations, accidentally handed down to us through an unforgiving yet generous history, stakes no claim to Sun Ra’s legacy––something which speaks for itself over and over again––but instead takes a joyful listener’s ‘cosmic pathway’ into its own unique imagistic swirl. Brian and his musical collaborators proceed in a spirit of serious play, respectful intrusion, and insistent openness, releasing hi-, lo-, and mid-fi sounds from the past into a new future of revelatory listening.”
Lou Mallozzi, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago

released May 7, 2013

Musicians:
Brian Harnetty, Piano, Rhodes Electric Piano, Celesta
Jeremy Woodruff, Saxophone, Flute
Fred Lonberg-Holm, Cello
Jeff Kimmel, Bass Clarinet
Aaron Butler, Vibraphone

Cover artwork and design: Damon Locks
Mastering: Alex Inglizian
Special thanks to: Lou Mallozzi and John Corbett

This project originated as an Interpretive Commission from the Creative Audio Archive at Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago in 2010. The original recordings are from the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection in the CAA; ESS licenses the use of the original recordings and protects their copyright. For more information and access to CAA online catalogs, please visit www.experimentalsoundstudio.org.