Star Grace

Star doesn't go so far as to position herself as a visitor from another world, but it's not like it would be out of reach for her to be rockin' on some kind of George Clinton or Sun Ra trip if she wanted to. What she offers, though more discreet and explicitly anchored in rock music, nevertheless points her audience towards a likeminded sense of communal elevation. For Star, the path forward runs, as unlikely as it sounds, through rave culture -- only with an unexpected twist. 

Raised in a part of Oregon, as well as Austin, Texas where the comet trail of hippie consciousness still glows bright, Star has always felt a strong connection to early-period Grateful Dead and the Merry Pranksters. In her eyes, The Dead started the world's first rave scene. She makes a convincing case for this in her own music, filtering assertive rock grooves through the mind-expanding properties of both psychedelia and electronic music. As far as Star sees it, Pink Floyd's UFO Club heyday and the dancefloor mysticism of '90s outfits like The Orb are two branches on the same tree. 

Star picks up with her own branch, but to regard her music as just the arbitrary weaving-together of two seemingly disparate aesthetic strands is to mis-read where she's coming from.
Over the past three decades, artists like Grace Jones, Bjork, MIA, Grimes, and FKA Twigs have each in their own unique ways infused music with elements of fashion, visuals, drama, and dance to create their own alchemy of expression that made them appear "alien" to everything that came before and after them. This is what Star strives for today. Her work bubbles with a healing undercurrent, as she attempts to reconcile and re-conjoin aspects of our humanity that have been wrenched apart: songcraft and spontaneity, fashion and substance, femininity and strength, sensuality and joy, charisma and inclusion, etc. 

Star’s music, for example, brims with hooks and hews towards tight, economical arrangements, but its DNA is encoded so that it can be stretched beyond recognition if the moment calls for it.  Every time Star performs, she stays highly attuned to the needs of the crowd. Part of her mission, she says, is to ensure that each rendition of a given song and each live set as a whole assumes a shape that speaks to the vibration of that particular audience at that particular moment. It's no easy task to both honor the essence of a song while letting it live a new life every night, but Star possesses that rare combination of risk-taking and poise to pull it off. 

-- Saby Reyes-Kulkarni