Home / Music / 5 Tracks for 5am Sunrises: Gavilán Rayna Russom's Black Meteoric Star

5 Tracks for 5am Sunrises: Gavilán Rayna Russom’s Black Meteoric Star

5 Minute Read
Gavilán Rayna Russom’s Black Meteoric Star
Music
 

A field guide to a feeling accidentally discovered, but never quite forgotten.

A guide to a feeling that many people have experienced by accident and still remember.

‘5am Open Air Sunrise’ marks the bold return of Gavilán Rayna Russom’s Black Meteoric Star, now out on our good ship R$N in partnership with the even greater ship Dark Entries.
The New York-based artist and DJ has created one of the most fittingly titled records in recent memory. This album captures a very specific hour, the real moment when the dancefloor shifts, when the body lets go, and the night transforms into something new, just before transforms into the dawn.

Recorded live and expanded with full reconstructions by Russell E.L. Butler and Borusiade, the record outlines that Black Meteoric Star has always been its own world. In Russom’s words, it is a vehicle built for survival… which feels very right for this very moment in time.

 

With the single now available and a full album coming soon, we asked Gavilán to chart the sounds of that hour by picking five tracks that capture the spirit of ‘5am Open Air Sunrise.’ The choices range from occult rock and deep house to subtle music by artists she has collaborated with, eventually circling back to Black Meteoric Star’s own work.

Together, these tracks create a field guide to a feeling most people have stumbled upon by chance and never forgotten.

Photo: Elodie Adam/@transopticon

See below:

Topics
5am sunrise Black meteoric star Gavilán Rayna Russom
LISTEN
Arthur Brown's Kingdom come - Sunrise

Mark Pilkington passed me this track back in 2005 when I was staying at his place in London on tour and it’s been a favorite ever since. Arthur Brown’s occult performativity is one of the many influences on the Black Meteoric Star identity. He had that disturbed, half-in-another-world kind of brilliance down. There’s a lot about “Sunrise” that I love. I’m particularly drawn to how it builds intensity and changes without ever having any kind of verse/chorus structures. It’s a long poem basically, and it really hits the deep internal layers of what “5am Open Air Sunrise” is pointing to.

  • Arthur Brown's Kingdom come - Sunrise

    Mark Pilkington passed me this track back in 2005 when I was staying at his place in London on tour and it’s been a favorite ever since. Arthur Brown’s occult performativity is one of the many influences on the Black Meteoric Star identity. He had that disturbed, half-in-another-world kind of brilliance down. There’s a lot about “Sunrise” that I love. I’m particularly drawn to how it builds intensity and changes without ever having any kind of verse/chorus structures. It’s a long poem basically, and it really hits the deep internal layers of what “5am Open Air Sunrise” is pointing to.

  • Mr Fingers - Can You Feel It

    It might be because of the cover image on the Chicago Trax compilation I first had this track on but this original instrumental of “Can You Feel It” has always been THE sound of a 5am sunrise to me. I listened to it a lot while working on The Days of Mars. The bass line and the synth pad especially just sound like the sun coming up, and the high-hat patterns drip with the ecstasy of being up all night. Larry Heard is such a master of this kind of evocative instrumental audio poetry. He has such a strong visual sense as a music producer, and this track is a peak illustration of that.

  • Marcy Angeles - A Cyborg’s Wet Dream

    Marcy is a prolific artist I’ve had a chance to work with through Voluminous Arts. “A Cyborg’s Wet Dream” is the opening track from the album Chasing Horses that she put out with us in 2022. Because she’s also a visual artist and a writer, Marcy’s music is rich with imagery. The synth pads and throbbing low-end drums give a depth to the way this track evokes the 5am sunrise feeling. And even beyond the imagery it evokes, it points towards deeper ideas about the connections between land, dawn, and perception that are available to Marcy as a two-spirit Indigenous producer.

  • CMD+JAZMINE - Ouroboros

    CMD+JAZMINE is another artist I’ve worked with at Voluminous Arts. By title alone this track is already prime 5am sunrise material, but those phasing keys and echoing synth drums take it right to the heart of the rising sun after a long night in the club. Jazmine’s relationship to producing music about space-both internal and external-is clear in all her releases. On her Parks Service EP she made this explicit. Even though Ouroboros came out the year before that EP, it feels in retrospect like an epilogue because of how deeply it conjures the feeling of a place. I’m instantly transported to memories of 5am sunrises after

    DJing at Bossa Nova Civic Club, waiting for the J train at Myrtle-Broadway, sipping on a juice from Mr Kiwi and processing the vividness of the night’s experiences.

  • Black Meteoric Star - Dawn

    Well, I had to. A lot of Black Meteoric Star is about references, and sometimes those are internal references. “5am Open Air Sunrise” is a call back to this much earlier track, recorded while I lived in Berlin. It still hits the bullseye in terms of the mood I’m talking about when I talk about the 5am sunrise experience. Over the time since I recorded it in 2008, I’ve reflected a lot on how the incredibly slow and incremental changes that happen in the lead line are a big part of that… something that also happens in “Fluid Feline Forms” on Disco. Here there’s this first wave of white noise that becomes gated and rhythmic, and then the noise slowly fades out and some chords take its place as a gated melodic element playing through the same channel, which then opens up into an extended solo as the gate slowly softens eventually leaving these long melodic lead lines over that chugging bass line that changes even slower and the drum beat that barely changes at all.