Sufjan Stevens
The BQE
(Asthmatic Kitty, 2009)

“I am one of them,” he writes, “and so are you: The average American car driver.” With that statement, a sliver from the self-penned essay Sufjan Stevens has included in the booklet for his film and album release The BQE, the acclaimed indie musician outs himself as—gasp!—a motorist. Stevens may live in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn, but he’s apparently no subterranean railway rider. The 34-year-old multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer was actually born in the one time automotive powerhouse, Detroit.

How American! And how fitting for a hard-working lad who propelled to greater visibility some years ago on account of his 50 States Project: An ambitious plan to write and record an album about each federated state in this here Union. It even turns out that the motor oil pumping through Stevens’ veins is good for more than just relating to the car-cultured folks of Michigan and Illinois, the two states he’s covered thus far.

Now Stevens, with his interest boldly fixed upon themes of American urbanity and mobility, unleashes The BQE. Ever one to get bored with a narrow set of formal constraints, and here turning his back on the lyrical indie-pop song, he instead sculpts 40 minutes of orchestral beauty and noisy tumult. Unfolding in 13 distinct sections, the composition is meant to express the joys and agonies of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a public-era project that both connects and bisects New York City’s two most populous boroughs.

Opening with a humming one-note drone that gradually melts into a sustained polyphonic whirr, the piece’s prelude announces immediately that it is a distinctly modern composition; classical music might have once glorified an overseeing god, but now we are ruled by god-like men. Large chunks of the work (or at least the accompanying booklet’s shambolic, adjectival thesis) decry former city planner Robert Moses, whose single-handed political brawn cleared the way for the roadway’s double-decade construction.

Still, much of The BQE concerns itself with the buildings, commuters, and mass automotive gridlocks the structure enables. One needn’t look any further than a sample section title—“Movement IV—Traffic Shock” is a contrasting blast of pulsating IDM—or the accompanying Stevens-directed film to hone in on the themes. Super 8 studies of pre-war buildings, stolid overpasses, and dense traffic (often sped-up or alternately run in a rush-hour crawl) tend to reinforce each musical moment, whether it’s manic flute jitters or lulling, cruise-controlled strings. A brief Vince Guaraldi-tinged piano-and-drums segment, “Interlude III—Invisible Accidents”, has some spry heroine hula hoopers that shimmy more nimbly than the dancing Peanuts gang, yet they (though probably unintentionally) still evoke their spirit.

Stevens, who was initially commissioned to create the work as a live performance by the Brooklyn Academy of Music two years ago, had no interest in stopping short of a many-media’d smorgasbord if he doesn’t have to, though—clearly movie and soundtrack just won’t suffice. Some editions of The BQE come with View-Master slides and/or a comic book, and the album packaging showcases Stevens’ amateur photography and professional graphic design skills extensively, supplying low-res snaps of vehicular gridlock with inscrutable digital graffiti placed over top. All of this is supposedly intended as a unified artistic front; nothing from Stevens’ vast BQE ouput is meant to stand alone, but rather for all of it to be considered, necessarily, in toto.

The type of Renaissance Man who can operate in a plurality of fields is not really a contemporary American ideal; past the Boy Scouts (Stevens seems to have gotten a merit badge in everything), most of us are grateful for having a single sustaining specialty. America, however, hasn’t ever been a modest place. And more to the point, we—whether writing, recording, or just plain ‘ol driving—have seldom, in the century most recently passed, contradicted any suggestion that more is better.

Listen: “Movement VI—Isorhythmic Night Dance with Interchanges“ [at asthmatickitty.com]