• Courtesy
• Astral Underground, Sunsets Are Sacred

(Self-released, CD, digital)

Last year, André 3000 released an album of instrumental flute music called New Blue Sun. That album — the first from the former Outkast rapper in 17 years — inspired strong reactions from fans hoping for a hip-hop record. As comedian Leslie Jones put it while guest hosting "The Daily Show," "This is how you know the white people are winning: Y'all done turned André 3000 into Jethro Tull!"

Maybe it's just my steady diet of eclectic Vermont music, but André's flute album didn't bother me one bit. Or perhaps it's because I'm already a fan of the Enosburgh cosmic-jazz trio Astral Underground. Consisting of local musicians Ben Maddox (Farm, the Mountain Says No) and John Notaro (Mushroom Teeth), along with flutist and Strut Records artist Margaux Simmons, who formed the avant-garde African jazz outfit the Pyramids in the 1970s, Astral Underground truly make flute music for the cosmos.

Their latest album, Sunsets Are Sacred, follows up their self-titled 2022 debut by going even deeper into the void of interstellar funk and new-age post-rock. Surrounded by Notaro's rock-solid drum work and Maddox's multi-instrumental layers of sound, Simmons and her flute take center stage throughout the record.

She leads off the album on "Taurus Witches" with a run of soft, ethereal notes building like latticework, as Maddox and Notaro come in with a gritty synth bass and frenetic drumbeat. It's jazz filtered through a doom-laden lens of indie rock and pulsing EDM. The vibe is so thick, you may want to call the BBC to demand that it use Sunsets Are Sacred to score a documentary about stars collapsing or black holes swallowing matter.

"Dog and Bird" channels the spiritual free jazz of Pharoah Sanders and sets up the even more esoteric title track. "Sunsets Are Sacred" is suffused with the primordial aura of Notaro's babbling, chaotic drums. Washes of synth and flute color in the margins of the song while leaving light-years of space.

Funk with shades of Sun Ra appears in "Middleweight." Maddox and Notaro link up like churning gears, while Simmons lets loose a barrage of cascading, aspirated notes on the flute. Her virtuosity is impossible to ignore on this album. Half a century of skill and invention comes through, whether she is playing long, keening figures on the glacial "Your Precious and Immortal Memory" or mixing it up on "X Loop," a propulsive, head-nodding jam.

Astral Underground might be one of the least likely Vermont bands in a long time: two veterans of the local heavy-rock scene combining forces with a legendarily skilled jazz flutist to create an amalgamation of genres that works on every level. It's the kind of music that exudes possibility and never telegraphs what's around the corner. André 3000 would approve.

Listen to Sunsets Are Sacred at astralunderground.bandcamp.com.