Sufjan Stevens: The BQE DVD + CD

Sufjan Stevens premiered The BQE, a film and musical suite exploring New York City's infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in November 2007. The critically applauded performance featured 36 performers including a band, a wind and brass ensemble, string players, a horn section, projected film footage of the expressway and five hula hoopers.

Entire package features the CD soundtrack, the DVD of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway film footage, a 40-page booklet with extensive liner notes & photographs and an accompanying stereoscopic 3-D Viewmaster reel.

The concept behind The BQE is based largely on the history of New York's Brooklyn-Queens Expressway 12.7 miles of urban roadway built between 1939 and 1964 by master urban planner Robert Moses. The Viewmaster, unveiled at the 1939 NYC World's Fair (the World's Fair being part of the motivation for the construction of the BQE, funnelling New Yorker's to and from Flushing, Queens), was intended to promote 3-D panoramic illusions of the American landscape and serve as advertising for various tourist destinations and motivation for American drivers. The Hooper Heroes comic book, written by Stevens and drawn, coloured and inked by collaborator Stephen Halker, follows three extra-terrestrial superhero sisters who use hula-hoops to combat the Messiah of Civic Projects, Captain Moses.

Tracklisting:
01. Prelude on the Esplanade
02. Introductory Fanfare for the Hooper Heroes
03. Movement I: In The Countenance of Kings
04. Movement II: Sleeping Invader
05. Interlude I: Dream Sequence in Subi Circumnavigation
06. Movement III: Linear Tableau with Intersecting Surprise
07. Movement IV: Traffic Shock
08. Movement V: Self-Organising Emergent Patterns
09. Interlude II: Subi Power Waltz
10. Interlude III: Invisible Accidents
11. Movement VI: Isorhythmic Night Dance with Interchanges
12. Movement VII (Finale): The Emperor of Centrifuge
13. Postlude: Critical Mass