Sufjan Stevens – Convocations (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Sufjan Stevens – Convocations (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:29:42 minutes | 899 MB | Genre: Electronic, Ambient
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Asthmatic Kitty

It may be tempting to reduce Convocations into a longform ambient anomaly within Sufjan Stevens’ vast catalogue. It is, however, neither an anomaly nor entirely ambient. This is not a side project. From his numerous dance scores for New York City Ballet to instrumental albums such as Enjoy Your Rabbit, Aporia, and The BQE, Stevens spends at least half his working life making largely instrumental music, as he has for decades. And though the first ten pieces, dubbed “Meditations,” unfurl as gorgeous states of reflective new-age grace, this is by no means an ambient enterprise. Stevens invokes the lessons of Morton Subotnick, Maryanne Amacher, Christian Fennesz, Brian Eno, and Wolfgang Voigt here. As musically erudite as it is emotionally experienced, Convocations can be dissonant, vertiginous, rhythmic, repetitive, urgent, or calm—that is, all the things we undergo when we inevitably live through loss, isolation, and anxiety.

Indeed, Convocations moves like a two-and-a-half-hour requiem mass for our present times of difficulty, its 49 tracks allowing for all these feelings to be felt. The album is divided into five sonic cycles, each replicating a different stage of mourning. Convocations occasionally soothes and sometimes hurts; when it’s done, you’re left with a renewed sense of wonder for being here at all.

In fact, Stevens made Convocations in response to (and as an homage to) the life and death of his biological father, who died in September last year, two days following the release of The Ascension. It is, then, ultimately an album about loss, and an album that reflects a year in which we have all lost so much. One could easily compare this project to Stevens’ album Carrie & Lowell, which he wrote following his mother’s death. But this is something entirely different. A new time, a new season, a new life lost, a new reckoning, a new kind of isolation, grief, despair, frustration, confusion, and the search for happiness and hope for the future. This is not a personal record, but a universal one. Convocations is built on a shared experience that seeks to be honest about how complicated grief can be in these difficult times—the pain, the anxiety, the unknown, the absolute joy of memory. This is also an album made in lockdown, when we were all cloistered in whatever space we had. So long as the science and statistics hold, Convocations arrives just as we begin to emerge from a year whose losses we will calculate for a lifetime. It is, then, right on time, as we begin to process our grief and try to carry on with it.

Tracklist:
CD1
1. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation I (03:40)
2. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation II (02:27)
3. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation III (04:04)
4. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation IV (02:10)
5. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation V (02:10)
6. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation VI (02:16)
7. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation VII (02:34)
8. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation VIII (01:48)
9. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation IX (02:12)
10. Sufjan Stevens – Meditation X (03:40)

CD2
1. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation I (03:48)
2. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation II (02:25)
3. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation III (03:17)
4. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation IV (01:59)
5. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation V (04:11)
6. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation VI (04:43)
7. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation VII (01:51)
8. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation VIII (03:35)
9. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation IX (03:29)
10. Sufjan Stevens – Lamentation X (01:57)

CD3
1. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation I (03:21)
2. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation II (02:53)
3. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation III (02:01)
4. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation IV (04:09)
5. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation V (02:51)
6. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation VI (03:34)
7. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation VII (04:03)
8. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation VIII (02:51)
9. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation IX (04:38)
10. Sufjan Stevens – Revelation X (04:18)

CD4
1. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration I (02:19)
2. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration II (05:55)
3. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration III (03:09)
4. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration IV (03:22)
5. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration V (02:59)
6. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration VI (04:01)
7. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration VII (03:41)
8. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration VIII (03:25)
9. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration IX (01:35)
10. Sufjan Stevens – Celebration X (04:10)

CD5
1. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation I (02:17)
2. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation II (01:58)
3. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation III (01:36)
4. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation IV (02:00)
5. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation V (03:15)
6. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation VI (01:49)
7. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation VII (01:53)
8. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation VIII (02:55)
9. Sufjan Stevens – Incantation IX (04:28)

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