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Watch Sufjan Steven's Latest Crazy Plot: A Laser-Filled Tribute to the Solar System

Sufjan Stevens is full of surprises.
Image via parn on Fotopedia

It would be an understatement to say that Sufjan Stevens is full of surprises. This is the  musician who once promised to make an album for each of the 50 states in the country. (He's only released two so far.) Then he went on some strange bender, released several albums of Christmas music, Sufjan-style.

Then came The Age of Adz, a real mind-bender of a record that became his most successful ever in 2010. Since then, he's been doing such various things as dressing up in lights to perform in Brooklyn and releasing a Christmas-themed hip-hop mixtape. (It's called Chopped and Scrooged.)

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So I wasn't surprised in the slightest when I heard that Sufjan — yes, we're on a first name basis — was putting together an acid trip of a performance art piece that celebrates the solar system with lasers and smoke and songs. It's called Planetarium and it sounds stellar.

The show is on this weekend in the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is scheduled continuing traveling the world as it has been for about a year. Brooklyn is its first stop in the United States. Dan Nosowitz went to the premiere and just posted a dispatch on Popular Science's website describing his experience at the premiere.

Backed up by Bryce Dessner of The National, composer Nico Muhly and a small orchestra with seven trombones, Sufjan takes the audience on a tour through the solar system with songs devoted to each of the major celestial bodies. According to Nosowitz, it was pretty moving:

It felt like we Brooklynites had tapped into something much grander than us, some sort of, I don't know, almost Druidic worship of the planetary bodies. Let's all gather around and worship that which we can see in the heavens. … Let's sit together in the dark and marvel at what's out there, what we can see and what we do not yet know.

Holy crap, where do I get tickets? (Here.) You'd better be committed, though. If you can't swindle your way into one of the three remaining Brooklyn shows, your last chance might be an April 22 at where else but the spaceship of a theater in Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

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If you can't make it to LA next month, there is still hope. Sufjan might add some more tour dates, and he's expected to release an album based on the project. All else fails, there's always YouTube. (Pretty much the whole thing has been posted — a few are embedded below.)

It's hard to engage in "Druidic worship of the planetary bodies" with just a streaming video and a profanity-filled comment thread, though. Unless Sufjan has some crazy YouTube surprise up his sleeve. Now I'm really curious.

Mercury, the smallest planet.

And Jupiter, the largest.