“My level of I-don’t-give-a-fuckery is so high right now,” Mustafa Stefan Dill, oudist, guitarist, composer, told me on the phone. He meant that in a positive way. Explode Yourself, the new release from Love Unfold the Sun, is a liberated celebration of life, unconcerned with fitting itself into any box‚ blowing the box wide open, in fact. This Friday, the band celebrates the album’s release at Paradiso in Santa Fe.

Love Unfold the Sun
Explode Yourself (Norumba Records)
A (p)review
Explode Yourself, the new release from the quartet Love Unfold the Sun—Mustafa Stefan Dill (oud, guitar, compositions), Dan Pearlman (cornet), Ross Hamlin (bass), Dave Wayne (drums)—cannot easily be categorized. It includes elements of classic rock, heavy metal, funk, jazz, flamenco, makam, all of which live happily together in music created in the service of ecstasy. It’s built on Dill’s compositions—he’s got a master’s in composition from the New England Conservatory—but it is manifested in the quartet’s well-tuned improvisational interactions.

After its stunning first release, Live at Duel, the quartet went on a forced pandemic sabbatical. That hiatus was lengthened by Dill’s dramatic health issues: a successful battle with tongue cancer, followed by an unrelated open heart surgery to remove a benign tumor in the left atrial chamber. “You come out of that not only with the clichéd appreciation for life that you see on every Hallmark card—right? But the other thing that people may not always talk about is that—you come out of that—you have no energy or bandwidth for nonsense,” says Dill.

That streamlined the process for Dill, who did not concern himself with adhering to any sort of musical genre—prog rock, free jazz, whatever. “I was able to let it be what it was going to be,” he says. “I got rid of agendas, and I got rid of excesses, and we just got to the business of playing music because that’s where the love of life is.”

A love of life suffuses every track—from the Middle Eastern hard rock/jazz fusion of “The Bite That Feeds,” complete with horripilating power chords, to the contemplative “Night Path,” a kind of Sufi dance of gratitude, on which the studio setting enabled the acoustic oud and the electric guitar to join together and which features an especially lovely solo from Pearlman. Dill’s solo on “Saba,” the least structured composition on the album, begins in a blues bar in Chicago and ends in Baghdad. Hamlin and Wayne lay a funky foundation on “Explode Yourself, Then Convulse,” and Wayne explodes himself on “Zapatos the Cat,” whose supremely imperturbable nature finds expression in a guitar trio and a cornet trio.

The music radiates a palpable and uplifting openness and freedom and a focused intensity. Dill compares it to lovemaking. “When you’re having sex or you’re making improvised music, both of those are about the most open and honest and vulnerable states of human consciousness one can be in,” he says, “because you’re opening yourself up to others, whether it’s your partner or your bandmates.”

Or your audience, for that matter, who, in turn, get opened up, as they most certainly will at Paradiso this Friday.

Love Unfold the Sun
and Present Moment
May 30 at 7:30 p.m.
Paradiso
903 Early Street, Santa Fe
Tickets: $20, $15 seniors, students free, available here

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© 2025 Mel Minter