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“”If Mahavishnu, Miles and Broetzmann’s Die Like A Dog quartet had a party in an Istanbul punk /metal club, it would be this.”
(overheard post-concert)
Love Unfold The Sun to release its first studio album “Explode Yourself” May 2, 2025
Searing, atmospheric and hypnotic, Love Unfold The Sun deftly summons free jazz, Middle Eastern and hard rock elements as the canvas for sparkling telepathic interplay and muscular grooves.
Love Unfold The Sun’s upcoming debut studio album “Explode Yourself” came about in the wake of bandleader/guitarist/oudist Mustafa Stefan Dill’s successful battle with cancer, followed by an unrelated open heart surgery to remove a benign tumour in the left atrial chamber the next year. Emerging from those life altering experiences with not only a renewed focus and appreciation of life, Mustafa also gained clarity about what really matters, and what’s essential in the remaining time we have.
As a result, “Explode Yourself” is a raucous, joyous celebration of exploding yourself with and for the love of life.
Originally conceived by Dill and popular throughout the 2000s, Love Unfold The Sun reconvened in 2018 with most of its original lineup. The band’s first two reunion shows were released as Live At Duel in February 2019 to critical acclaim.
The interplay, energy, range, and the much freer take on the usual world/jazz mashup genre made the 2019 release a compelling offering:
“The open improvisations reveal an acute sensitivity,… ushering the quartet into one bracing and surprising exploration after another.” Mel Minter, Musically Speaking
“…[the group members] combine nicely the kind of post-Milesian electricity of the Davis ’70s bands with a Mid-Eastern sensibility and plenty of freedom. Dill has his own way around the guitar and it has been influenced quite naturally by his own oud work. Everybody gets with it here. It is a good go of things…” Grego Edwards, Gapplegate
Love Unfold The Sun has developed an enthusiastic and ever-growing following via its live shows, spurring the digital-only Live at Paradiso in 2024, a documentation of the band’s celebratory reunion following Dill’s bouts with cancer and open heart surgery.
“Explode Yourself” is the group’s first studio release, offering new tracks as well as a more detailed, concise treatment of previous live material, while still maintaining their trademark spontaneity and sensitivity.
The vibe is set right away with The Bite That Feeds, which encapsulates much of what Love Unfold The Sun does – hard rock, Middle Eastern elements, group interplay, dynamic shifts – all in one concise punch, taking no quarter right out of the gate and going from there.
The album moves straight into Delirium, a hard blues-y feel with a Middle Eastern overlay and a bit of Sabbath–esque menace in the turnaround. A few tunes later we encounter the 2010 composition Rising, inspired by and dedicated to the many thousands creating the winds of change at the time known as the Arab Spring.
The final track on Explode Yourself is Saba, a loose piece around the Saba Zamzam maqam. A slow and sexy, funky groove with a wide range of dynamics and spaces, the piece is often Love Unfold The Sun’s encore piece – and thus a natural way to close the journey of this veteran band’s long awaited debut studio album.
Never one to rest upon the completion of one project, Mustafa Stefan Dill is working on a solo acoustic album in 2025, re-examining his unique abstraction of traditional flamenco elements and modern free improvisation that garnered critical acclaim and festival performances throughout Europe in the late 90s/2000s.