[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Sun Ra: “Space Probe” (excerpt)

From the album Space Probe (1970)

In 1968, the visionary afro-futurist musician and bandleader Sun Ra moved his Arkestra from New York to Philadelphia, where the band took up residence in the Germantown neighborhood in the northern part of the city. “To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth,” he later recalled, “and that was Philadelphia, which was death’s headquarters.”

But despite his initial disdain for what he called the “city of brotherly shove,” Sun Ra eventually made himself at home in Philadelphia, and became a fixture at the city’s libraries, record stores, and radio stations. He lived in Philadelphia until his death in 1993, and the Arkestra remains based in Philly to this day, led currently by saxophonist Marshall Allen.

Space Probe was among the first Philadelphia releases on Sun Ra’s own Saturn label. Like many of his recordings from this period, it was put out in limited numbers and available only at performances. The title track is an 18-minute odyssey of synthesized pyschedelia created on a prototype Minimoog. (The thick, layered sound was probably created by multi-track recording the synth, which was monophonic.) This was Sun Ra’s first recorded work with the Moog, an instrument that would become a regular part of his setup. It is a stunningly experimental piece of music whose throbbing electronic ecstasies bear a remarkable affinity to Henri Pousseur’s 8 Études Paraboliques of 1972. (Was the Belgian composer inspired by Sun Ra, perhaps having heard him during the Arkestra’s 1970 European tour? Anything’s possible.)

John Szwed’s biography of Sun Ra, Space is the Place, provides a taste of the Arkestra’s performances circa 1970:

“At Gino’s Empty Foxhole, the basement of a church [St. Mary’s episcopal] on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, he used lighting combined with industrial fans to create solar storms that sent the musicians’ capes billowing as if the Arkestra was in flight. Then Sun Ra disappeared into his own cape, his face outlined against the windblown fabric, and, while a space chord howled, he tore a hole in the cape and poked his head through, as if he were ripping an opening in space itself. To members of the audience who came prepared by hallucinogens and stimulants—as they did more and more often nowadays—the spectacle was magnified beyond belief.” 

May 05, 2011, 3:34pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Pink Floyd: “Sysyphus” (excerpt)

From the album Ummagumma (1969)

The late 1960s witnessed the glorious psychedelic marriage of the traditions of rock-and-roll and experimental/electronic music.  The years 1968-69 alone saw The Beatles’ musique concrète-inspired “Revolution 9,” Pierre Henry’s collaboration with the British prog-rock band Spooky Tooth on the album Ceremony, and the release of Pink Floyd’s monumental double album Ummagumma, the band’s fourth album and arguably the most adventurous project they would ever undertake. 

The first half of Ummagumma consists of a set of live recordings of songs from the band’s earlier releases, while the second half is a collection of studio work by each of the band members individually.  Roger Waters contributed the pastoral ballad “Grantchester Meadows” and a bizarre piece of self-described “concrete poetry” entitled “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.”  David Gilmour’s piece is called “The Narrow Way,” and Nick Mason rounds out the album with his “Grand Vizier’s Garden Party,” the body of which is a studio-created exploration of percussive sonority that evokes Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation.

Keyboardist Richard Wright’s contribution, entitled “Sysyphus,” opens with a minatory theme for orchestral strings à la Mellotron, punctuated by timpani strokes and cymbals.  From here we move seamlessly into a different expressive zone, where Wright demonstrates his classical chops with an ornate, Chopinesque piano interlude that gradually decomposes into a dissonant haze of sustained clusters. The next section, presenting yet another striking contrast of musical style, is a wonderfully disjunct mix of directly plucked piano sounds, percussive interjections, and tape-stretched vocal timbres.  After a bit of a lull toward the end (omitted in this excerpt), a cacophonous orchestral explosion ushers in a noisy sound-field from which the original “Sysyphus” theme slowly rises like a spectral figure from the fog. This is a “symphonic” conception of experimental rock that would be developed further in Pink Floyd’s later albums, starting with their very next release, Atom Heart Mother, whose title track is a 24-minute instrumental work of unsurpassed brilliance.

June 01, 2010, 10:16am