Rob Mazurek - Alternate Moon Cycles Live at The Land School, out now exclusively on Qobuz // + performance film by Brian Ashby
(cover art by Aaron Lowell Denton)
ROB MAZUREK
Alternate Moon Cycles
Live at The Land School
*** OUT NOW EXCLUSIVELY ON QOBUZ ***
Listen in the US here.
Listen everywhere else in the world here.
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025, Chicago-born record label International Anthem capped off an entire year of anniversary activities (under the IA11 chrysanthemum banner) with a very special event celebrating the label’s actual eleventh solar return at their new Southside Chicago HQ inside Theaster Gates and Rebuild Foundation’s latest space-based project, The Land School.
The evening featured a performance by Rob Mazurek with Matthew Lux and Mikel Patrick Avery (the ensemble behind Alternate Moon Cycles, the very first album in the IARC catalog, which was originally released December 2nd, 2014), in what Mazurek refers to as “A Polysonic Resonance Field in One Continuous Movement.”
The full performance recording – Alternate Moon Cycles Live at The Land School - is now available for hi-res stream or download exclusively via Qobuz.
Listen in the US here.
Listen everywhere else in the world here.
(photo by Alec Basse)
About the performance, Mazurek recalls:
“At the invitation of International Anthem, I gathered with Mikel Patrick Avery and Matthew Lux at The Land School, the cultural complex initiated by Theaster Gates on Chicago’s South Side, to mark the 11th anniversary of the label. The occasion carried a special resonance for me: eleven years earlier, the very first release on International Anthem was Alternate Moon Cycles. Returning to the work at this moment felt less like revisiting a recording than re-entering a living cycle. Within the ethos of The Land School—Gates’s ongoing transformation of abandoned civic architecture into a site for cultural experimentation, land stewardship, and collective imagination—the music naturally took the form of a gathering rather than a concert: culminating in the creation of this new work so masterfully recorded by Dave Vettraino and David Allen titled “Moon Treader”, a polysonic resonance field in one continuous movement.
Performing on trumpets, voice, bells, flutes, sopila, and RMI electric piano, I approached each instrument as a transmitter within a shared acoustic ecology. Avery, on drums, percussion, flutes, guitar, and electronics, shaped shifting rhythmic and textural architectures, while Lux, on bass VI and electronics, generated the gravitational center of the ensemble. Together we moved through phases of sound—signals appearing, dissolving, and recombining across the architecture of the space. The trio functions less as a band than as a hybrid organism of resonance, which I have often described in my work concerning the Radical Chimera: a convergence of disparate parts converging into a single evolving field or vibration.
This approach grows out of my Abstractivist practice and the ideas I have been developing around the Perihelion Gaze—a way of perceiving both visually and sonically from the moment of closest orbital approach, when forces intensify and relationships become newly visible or heard. In the context of the Anthropocene, this perspective opens toward what I call the Astropocene, a reorientation of awareness toward the celestial cycles that shape terrestrial life. Alternate Moon Cycles follows that logic: sound moving in stages like lunar bodies, resonance acting as the primary compositional force, and the listening space itself becoming a temporary cosmology where the room, audience, architecture, archive, universe, and vibration briefly align. In celebrating eleven years of International Anthem, the music returned not as memory but as dynamic orbit—continuing its movement through time, towards a new all inclusive Utopian Future.“
Listen to Alternate Moon Cycles Live at The Land School in the US here.
Listen everywhere else in the world here.
Alternate Moon Cycles
Live at The Land School
performance film by Brian Ashby
Today's Qobuz-exclusive live recording is released alongside a 36-minute film by director Brian Ashby, documenting the second half of Mazurek's performance at The Land School.
International Anthem & Qobuz present
Alternate Moon Cycles Live at The Land School is the latest fruit of an ongoing partnership between International Anthem and Qobuz, a collaboration that began in 2022 at Public Records in New York, and in 2025 expanded to include performances at The Land School in Chicago (with the release of International Anthem @ The Land School Volume 1, by Tom Skinner).
Together they've co-presented thirteen shows in four years, yielding ten exclusive live recordings thus far, documenting rare and unforgettable performances by Jeff Parker, SML, Anna Butterss, Makaya McCraven, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, and more. This playlist compiles all of those recordings in one place.
Rob Mazurek
Alternate Moon Cycles
(IA11 Edition)
*** OUT NOW ***
Rob Mazurek’s Alternate Moon Cycles was International Anthem's first release. The incredibly spare single-note-centered cornet, bass and organ chant was recorded to tape at pint-sized Chicago bar Curio in December 2012, as part of a performance series that predates any notion of our label’s existence. Documenting this performance – highly unique even within the depths of Mazurek’s vast catalog – stirred those notions, and soon talks began of releasing the recording on a fresh imprint.
Performed by Mazurek with Matthew Lux and Mikel Patrick Avery, the music unfolds glacially amongst the gentle creaks, clinks, whispers, and scuffles of the active room. It’s difficult to imagine a more honest rendering of the two sidelong pieces of organic minimal music, and nearly impossible to separate the sounds from their performance context.
Now this long-gone gem of supernatural frequency excavation is back in print on vinyl, wrapped in our IARC 2025 obi strip, with a new 4-page insert booklet featuring additional session photos and fresh liner notes by Mikel Patrick Avery.
