Sufjan Stevens

★★★ Convocations ASTHMATIC KITTY. CD/DL/LP

Sufjan and grief reconnect on 150-minute, five-disc electronic requiem.

Carrie And Lowell, in 2017, was Stevens’ intimate songcycle tribute to his late mother. His father died in 2020, inspiring Convocations, which takes a very different form: 49 electronic instrumentals split into five sections – Meditations, Lamentations, Revelations, Celebrations and Incantations. Despite Stevens’ committed Christian beliefs, Convocations is anything but churchy or new age-y, siding more with the raw, rhythmic and even disruptive energies of systems music pioneers like Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley. Lamentation III could be the Radiophonic Workshop; Revelation II’s choral samples suggest a simultaneously ecstatic and unsettling afterworld, a potential equivalent of heaven and hell; Revelation III’s spectral calm is the exception not the rule. Grief takes many forms, but Convocations

– conceived in lockdown and isolation – represents anguish and discombobulation, without having yet reached acceptance.