Rob Mazurek has released Alternate Moon Cycles Live at The Land School, available for hi-res streaming and download exclusively via Qobuz (US/Rest of World) alongside a 36-minute film by director Brian Ashby (watch below). The recording documents a performance on December 2nd, 2025, at The Land School — International Anthem‘s Southside Chicago headquarters inside Theaster Gates and Rebuild Foundation’s latest space-based project — where Mazurek reunited with Matthew Lux and Mikel Patrick Avery to mark the label’s eleventh anniversary.
The occasion carried particular weight. Alternate Moon Cycles was the very first release in International Anthem’s catalogue, originally issued on December 2nd, 2014. That recording — an incredibly spare, single-note-centred cornet, bass and organ chant — was taped at pint-sized Chicago bar Curio in December 2012, as part of a performance series that predates any notion of the label’s existence. Documenting it stirred the conversations that would eventually lead to the creation of International Anthem.
Returning to the work eleven years on, Mazurek describes the performance as something closer to ritual than concert:
“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.”
The Qobuz-exclusive live recording is released alongside a 36-minute film by director Brian Ashby, documenting the second half of Mazurek’s performance. The original Alternate Moon Cycles is also back in print on vinyl, wrapped in an IARC 2025 obi strip with a new insert booklet featuring session photos and fresh liner notes by Avery.
The release is the latest fruit of an ongoing partnership between International Anthem and Qobuz, which has yielded exclusive live recordings from Jeff Parker, SML, Anna Butterss, Makaya McCraven, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, Tom Skinner, and more across thirteen co-presented shows since 2022.