The Astral Pastorales is a large-scale suite composed by Rob Mazurek and performed by his Exploding Star Orchestra. It unfolds as a celestial pastorale, an expansive sonic landscape where composition, improvisation, electronics, and spoken word merge into a single evolving field.

These shows are co-produced by Experimental Sound Studio and Instigation Festival. The eight musicians will be staying in Yerkes’ restored, residency homes for the entire week. They’ll be collaborating with Yerkes’ astronomers, artists, and staff while immersing themselves in the culture of Yerkes, Williams Bay, and the Lake District. Yerkes staff members are pumped up for this fall celebration of music and cross-pollination in our special spaces.

These shows will be in the Big Dome at Yerkes on Friday, October 2nd at 7:30pm and Saturday, October 3rd at 7:30pm. Only 50 tickets are available per show! All tickets are $50.

Rob Mazurek is a multidisciplinary artist / abstractivist with a focus on electro-acoustic composition, improvisation, performance, painting, sculpture, video, film, and installation. He spent much of his creative life in Chicago and then Brazil. He currently lives and works in Marfa, Texas.

Over the past two decades, Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra (ESO) has become one of the most significant large-ensemble projects in contemporary creative music. Since its first appearance in 2005 at Chicago’s Millennium Park, the orchestra has evolved into a living constellation of musicians. While Chicago artists have remained central to its identity, dozens of players from around the world have worked with the group, creating a veritable cross-section of 21st-century jazz and improvised music. ESO functions less like a traditional big band than a creative family, a collective in which musicians may move between projects yet remain part of an ongoing orbit.

Line-up

Rob Mazurek – compositions, trumpets, bells

Damon Locks – voice, samplers

Steve Marquette – guitar

Mikel Patrick Avery – drums, percussion

Tomeka Reid – cello

Nicole Mitchell – flutes

Victor Vieira Branco – vibraphone

Jason Adasiewicz – vibraphone

Across its recordings and large-scale suites, the orchestra has significantly shaped the language of modern experimental music. Early releases such as Stars Have Shapes (2007) introduced the ensemble’s expansive approach to orchestration and improvisation, blending AACM-influenced creative music traditions with electronics, cosmic imagery, and open collective form. The monumental double-album Galactic Parables (2015) expanded that vision further, presenting a sweeping narrative work that fused large-ensemble improvisation with mythic and Afrofuturist themes, and demonstrating how contemporary orchestral music could operate as a fluid, collaborative sound ecosystem.

Subsequent projects continued to deepen the orchestra’s influence. Dimensional Stardust (2020) revealed a refined, luminous ensemble language interweaving electronics, chamber-like textures, and collective improvisation into a work that many critics recognized as one of the defining large-ensemble recordings of its era. Meanwhile, Live at the Adler Planetarium (2024) captured the orchestra performing beneath the cosmic environment of Chicago’s iconic planetarium, reinforcing Mazurek’s ongoing dialogue between sound, space, and celestial imagination.

Through these recordings and the many musicians who have passed through its ranks, Exploding Star Orchestra has helped redefine what a 21st-century creative orchestra can be: flexible, intergenerational, globally connected, and grounded in collective exploration. By bridging Chicago’s avant-garde lineage with new compositional strategies, deep research, and an ever-expanding community of improvisers, ESO has become both a platform for evolving sonic cosmology and a crucial catalyst for contemporary creative music worldwide.

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