As a follow-up to CIRCUMSTELLAR [ ilusorecords.bandcamp.com/album/circumstellar ], RE-ENTRY, the new release by guitarist-composer-producer Álvaro Domene and saxophonist-composer Álvaro Pérez represents the next step in the evolution of this project's thrilling sound that draws inspiration from orchestral, jazz, electronic, and metal musics, as well as cosmology and radical politics.

Make sure you read the liner notes which were written in real time by astrophysicist Luke Keller as he experienced the album for the first time:


Entry

Stars have filled our view like particles. Now we see an abrupt change as we enter a magnetosphere. The dance begins...planetary magnetic field with the stellar wind. Glowing, obscuring as it illuminates. Cooperating with gravity to span the not quite vacuum as it thickens to rarefied atmosphere. The cadence picks up. As we enter we witness many orbital sunrises as our orbit decays. We're glowing with thermal energy. Particles we encounter are no longer ionizing...could they be...life sustaining? The beauty and potential are almost paralyzing.


Descent

Free fall evolves into flight. The gift of gravitational force reminds us we have mass, bodies, that we're substance, alive. Pulse, exhilarating, exciting, terrifying, calming all at once. We begin to identify details as we approach a surface we could not know from orbit. Motion washes the scene. No time to focus on just one place; it's still a whole world out there.


Landing

Landings are invigorating, terrifying, empowering endings that enable beginnings. We're coming home or we're arriving for the first time. Descent is arrested, but there is still danger. The surface, already speeding past, seems to accelerate as we approach. Potential for tenderness and quiet or for sound and violence all at once. Touching down...are we there yet? We've been there all along and yet we'll never fully arrive. Dust settles.


A World in Which Many Worlds Fit

Expectations and imagery meet experience and senses. Comparative planetology; do I know this place, these places? Every planet contains multiple worlds: some mirror images of ours, others surprising in their familiar mystery, some jarring and alien. Excitement to explore, to sense, to record, to imagine ourselves as from here even as we just arrived here.


Spallation Avoidance

Can we really avoid disintegration? Should we? Footprints destroy the surface under foot and yet they enable our progress and signify our passage. Not long ago we were a meteoroid that left an ion trail through an atmosphere filled with promise. We left some of ourselves, of our craft along that trail. It settles to the surface. But just enough to say we were there as we passed through. Not enough to breach the bubble that sustains us and traps us in familiarity and manages our controlled free fall to the surface.


Dhjete

Powers ten are powers of then. That's how we experience our near space. Decibels. Stellar magnitudes. We sit here in bodies that span the space from negative exponents to positive exponents; from the microscopic, even subatomic, to the enormous, even cosmic. Powers of ten are powers of now.


Re-Entry

Re-Entry is a mixed bag of returning and longing to stay away. Returning, passing within, recalls the violence and anticipation of the launch, the departure, the transition from somewhere to nowhere and then to somewhere else. And our space and time are never the same again. Regardless of directionality, regardless of polarity, regardless of sincerity. Re-entry is a kaleidoscope of here and now painted with a palate from then and there.


Puerta al Sur

Do we dare enter or exit? Facing inwards or outwards; maybe sideways is easier. Head on the swivel, forward and aft. A star-set, a star-rise from the opposite direction, gives us the gift of a pause. A moment to process. What's north of the north pole of this orbiting sphere? Maybe it's us staring back at ourselves. Changed forever.

- Luke Keller, astrophysicist and professor of Astronomy and Physics at Ithaca College, New York.