The electronic-music composition Oktophonie by the late Karlheinz Stockhausen is being performed this week in New York City with a space themed production:

• OKTOPHONIE : Program & Events : Park Avenue Armory
• OKTOPHONIE Music Experience Aims to Emulate Space Travel – Space.com

From the program description:

New York Premiere
By Karlheinz Stockhausen
Environment designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most significant composers of modern and electronic music, influencing artists from The Beatles to Bjork, Miles Davis to Animal Collective, Frank Zappa, and more. Performed by one of his original collaborators Kathinka Pasveer, the maverick composer’s OKTOPHONIE from his opus Licht gets an exciting new life in an epic production of this monumental composition.

Acclaimed contemporary visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija stages the work as the composer originally intended—in outer space—creating a lunar floating seating unit to fully envelop the listener in octophonic sound. Adorned in white, the audience takes a ritualistic musical journey from plunging darkness into blinding light to fully immerse themselves in the all-encompassing score and surroundings. The vastness of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is the perfect setting to fully realize this rarely performed work that Stockhausen so boldly envisioned in its highly-anticipated New York premiere.

Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, and Nico Muhly have created an elaborate song cycle show titled Planetarium, which includes 10 songs on the theme of the Solar System. Here are some reviews of the America premier of the concert held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week:

• Trip Report: Sufjan Stevens’s Laser-Fueled Tour Through The Solar System – Popular Science
• Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly & Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Planetarium’ made its debut at BAM (pics) – BrooklynVegan.com
• Sufjan Stevens, Bryce Dessner, and Nico Muhly Light Up Their Proggy ‘Planetarium’ in Brooklyn – SPIN

The work was also performed at the Sydney Opera House last summer: Planetarium at the Sydney Opera House – Workhorse – June.25.12

Here is a performance of “Jupiter”:

The following video will continue through all ten songs from the show in Amsterdam on April 8th 2012:

Robert Lamb‘s latest space music posting  looks at three musicians: Space Music: Buddhist Stars, Sun Sounds and Alphabet’s Heaven – The Blogs at HowStuffWorks.

He begins with Lucianne Walkowicz, who works as a Princeton astrophysicist in her day job on the Kepler mission. She creates

sonifications of data from NASA’s Kepler mission. The sounds you hear are drawn from changes measured in the brightness of stars, which have certain frequencies that depend on how rapidly the star is spinning.

Find more about her music at

• Rhythms of starlight: Fellows Friday with Lucianne Walkowicz – Ted.com
• lmwalkowicz’s stream on SoundCloud – Hear the world’s sounds

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The second musician is Robert Alexander and Lamb points to the recent VICE video about him, which I reported on here.

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The third entry in Lamb’s piece is

the video for Alphabet’s Heaven’ s “Birthday” from Siamese Burn EP on King Deluxe, animated by Renata Gąsiorowska. Absolutely lovely.