Wandering Stars leave one more for the road

Wandering Stars’ new album, ISM, formed nearly as gradually as the duo’s galactic namesake, the roots of the record stretching back more than five years to the early months of the Covid pandemic.

At the time, Gregory Stokes had just procured a MIDI keyboard, and amid this isolation he began to experiment with its sonic capabilities, striking keys and letting the notes reverberate and subside. On one of these early nights, Stokes recalled how he began to layer together chords against the backdrop of the resurgent Black lives matter protests then unfolding less than a mile away downtown, the nighttime stillness punctuated by the occasional sound of flashbangs and the steady, circling presence of police helicopters.

“It sounded like the world was going to end,” said Stokes, joined for an early June interview by Wandering Stars bandmate Derek Christopher. “And I remember going to my room, plugging a keyboard in, and the stuff that ended up coming out became, I think, the first song on the album (‘Worry Stone’).”

Rather than focusing on external factors, ISM generally traverses inner realms, its lyrics informed by the various philosophers with whom the two musicians have long had a fascination, and its spacious soundscapes shaped in part by the stillness that in many ways defined those initial stay-at-home days.  

The patient sound explored within ISM was accompanied by a time-consuming new approach to writing and recording, which involved tracking a song and then setting it aside for as long as six months before returning to it and making the necessary tweaks. “And ultimately, that’s why making this record took five years,” said Christopher, who allowed that this was the first time in his career that he let the music so fully define the process. “I’ve never been one to let the songs dictate the pace of the work, but that’s absolutely what we did with this one. And if I hadn’t, I think it would have been breaking the spirit of our collaboration.”

Collectively, the album unfolds like a dark night of the soul, tracks exploring concepts such as human suffering (“Despondent”), the nature of consciousness (“Keyhole”), and the reality that a true moral code extends from within rather than granted from the heavens (“The Measure of Nothing”). A sense of relief arrives with the album-closing “Flicker,” which sees the weather breaking both lyrically (“Step outside, feel the sunlight,” a voice intones) and musically, the drums snapping to life as the song begins to take flight just beyond the four-minute mark.

While there are personal admissions coded within the tracks – Christopher noted at least one line embedded within addresses a friend who died by suicide – most of the lyrics speak more broadly to the human condition, existing at some remove from time or place. This was a purposeful decision, Christopher said, and one the two landed on following a 2020 conversation in which they debated the merits of connecting these songs with the protests taking place within earshot of where the music originated.

“We spent a couple of hours on a back porch one day, talking about ways we could somehow tie these songs to everything that was going on,” he said. “And I have no regrets that we didn’t, because if we had, it would have always been dated to that time. It would have been there, and it would have stayed there. And I think the way we did it gave us more freedom. It doesn’t take up a certain era. It doesn’t take up a certain place in time, or a certain decade. You can’t really pin down when it was fucking made.”

This idea is further augmented by the music, which largely eschews the more industrial push of earlier Wandering Stars recordings, the pair instead utilizing a number of pre-World War II synthesizers that include the Mellotron, the Ondes Martenot, and a Novachord, among others. 

“We went in asking, ‘What if we made the first industrial album ever, and it was made in 1915, and you found it in your grandma’s attic?’” Christopher said of ISM, which released digitally today (Thursday, June 12), and which the pair plan to celebrate over dinner together tonight at Aubergine – a final toast before closing the book on Wandering Stars for good.

It’s only within recent months that the musicians decided to pull the plug on the project, attributing the decision to a combination of factors that include the increased pressures of family and work life (Stokes owns Accent Wine and the Bottle Shop, with more businesses on the way) and a belief that they had accomplished everything musically they hoped to under the Wandering Stars umbrella.

“It doesn’t mean that Derek and I are never going to do something together again,” Stokes said. “But when he and I started, we were both very different people in very different stages of our lives. And it was a fundamentally different thing when, if it was three o’clock in the morning and you didn’t feel like sleeping, you could walk two blocks over to your buddy’s house, pour a whiskey, and be like, ‘Hey, let’s fuck around with this.’ … Plus, Wandering Stars has certainly carved out an identity in terms of its sound, and I think this record pushes that to the breaking point. Now, if anything, there’s complete freedom for us to go off and do something new.”

“Look, when we first came out with After Animals [in 2018], we sold-out all the albums in less than a week, and had to order more, and sold those in less than a week,” said Christopher, an accomplished producer who has worked on albums by artists such as Kali Dreamer, Shinobi Shaw, and Cherimondis J. “And I remember, at the time, we sold out [a show at] what was then Shrunken Head. But the longer we’ve done this, the less it’s been like, ‘Hey let’s do music and play shows,’ and it’s been more about just the music. And I think this album is the one where it was like, wow, there aren’t even egos to check here. There is nothing but the music. And I think it makes sense for us to go out on that.”