Tonight, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Sufjan Stevens will debut The BQE, a 30-minute symphonic and cinematic exploration of New York City’s infamous Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A controversial roadway since its inception in the 1930s, the BQE tears through 11.7 miles of Brooklyn and Queens, severing neighborhoods, pillaging industrial yards, and contouring waterways with the brute force of modern urban planning.

Click on more to read further about Sufjan’s relation to the BQE.

For the unacquainted driver, the BQE is a beast to be reckoned with. Unlike the high speed Autobahn or the prestigious New Jersey Turnpike, the BQE is a battered and baffling roadway plagued by relentless constriction and inexplicable traffic jams. Pot holes, steep grades, sharp turns, traffic cones, detours, and a parade of big rigs and Mack trucks create a rollercoaster obstacle course for the unsuspecting commuter. Crumbling concrete, rusted buttresses, and a persistent cast of billboards advertising big cars and Hollywood movies convey less an interchange of traffic and more a post-modern joy ride through the carnival spook house of Brooklyn and Queens.

For Stevens, the expressway is not an unlikely love interest. Born in Detroit, MI, his preoccupation with the automobile is apparent in songs referencing Chevrolet trucks, back seats, hatchbacks, and car factory jobs. But this is not the typical machismo fascination with cars—horsepower and acceleration—but rather a metaphysical romance with movement, progress, and the American landscape, wrestled out with the politics of transportation and car companies. The automobile has come to symbolize one of the most efficient mechanisms of the American Dream, the machine by which drivers achieve their own Manifest Destiny. In this context, The BQE seeks to uncover, through soundscape and cinematography, the countless characteristics of that Manifest Destiny when converged with urban blight. As a musical and visual expedition, The BQE forages cement surfaces, badly marked exits, stilted bridges, spectacular city views, road workers, commuters, and construction sites for systems and patterns of mass movement that map out an epic legend inscribed in the twists and turns of city life. The BQE presents a consensus of abstract patterns of movement and sound personified in the snakelike meandering of roads, evoking a narrative pattern in traffic, in the effects of weather and pollution, in the constant activity of automobiles, the music of the car horn and the hydraulic brake, and the reverent hum of the combustible car engine thumping for miles around.

Sufjan Stevens will be appearing at the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in early November, but you can catch him performing for another New York acronymic mainstay, the PEN American Center (which officially stands for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists) on November 28th at 8pm at Southpaw (125 Fifth Ave. Park Slope, Brooklyn). Sufjan will be speaking and performing alongside fellow writer/musicians Rick Moody, and John Wesley Harding (aka Wesley Stace).

Doors open at 7pm. Tickets are $10 and available in advance from the Southpaw website.