Sun Ra
Excelsior Mill
Boomkat Product Review:
Sun Ra knocks heads clean-off with his astonishing Wurlitzer organ recordings made at a legendary Atlanta club in 1984 and previously unreleased, vamping like a ‘50s horror score or entrance/theme music for a futuristic cult leader-cum-apocalyptic prophet. Out of this world!!!
Somehow only issued now for the first time, ‘Excelsior Mill’ is a remarkable addition to Sun Ra’s already fearsome catalogue that was instrumental in expanding the jazz vernacular. It’s a relatively rare and utterly ravishing example of Ra dolo, using the multiple keyboards and unique qualities of the Wurlitzer organ to command a sound comparable to Bernard Hermann on PCP or the impact of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Sring’ on an unsuspecting audience. Flying from the 20 minutecalamitous clash of atonalities and brassy aggression to ‘Beyond Hiroshima’, thru an 18 minute title part evoking the ‘Fantasia’ score, and onto a pair of devastating vignettes, it frames Ra at a peak of his elemental might and frankly blows our tiny minds to smithereens.
A little research tells us that Excelsior Mill existed as a venue between 1978-1989, so Ra’s show can be reliably dated to that period. That said, his use of a then-anachronistic instrument, and the music’s wild verve, hails a thrust to Ra’s work that had existed since the 1940s (circa ‘Fantasia’) and persisted in fucking with perception of time and space ’til his passing in 1993. In effect, we hear some half century of cinematic, operatic, classical and jazz forms collapsed into the music’s head-swallowing black holes of Afro-futurist sturm und drang.
Boldly utilising the Wurlitzer like an early synthesiser, as intended, Sun Ra deploys the classic pipe organ as particle and concept accelerator for his unparalleled imagination. In the jaw-dropping ‘Beyond Hiroshima’ he dials up a common theme in his music, of nuclear threat, to frightening degrees with walls of brassy terror reminding to ‘Fantasia’ as much as the A-bomb scene of Lynch’s Twin Peaks S3, before yoking back a little in the tile piece to play around with the organ’s percussive carillon sounds, only to rag minds thru asteroid fields of noise and orchestral bombast that he distills in the 3’ ‘Wurlitzer’ and somewhere closer to a possessed live player for a ball game in ‘Excelsior Terminus’.
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Violet colour vinyl.
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Boomkat Product Review:
Sun Ra knocks heads clean-off with his astonishing Wurlitzer organ recordings made at a legendary Atlanta club in 1984 and previously unreleased, vamping like a ‘50s horror score or entrance/theme music for a futuristic cult leader-cum-apocalyptic prophet. Out of this world!!!
Somehow only issued now for the first time, ‘Excelsior Mill’ is a remarkable addition to Sun Ra’s already fearsome catalogue that was instrumental in expanding the jazz vernacular. It’s a relatively rare and utterly ravishing example of Ra dolo, using the multiple keyboards and unique qualities of the Wurlitzer organ to command a sound comparable to Bernard Hermann on PCP or the impact of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Sring’ on an unsuspecting audience. Flying from the 20 minutecalamitous clash of atonalities and brassy aggression to ‘Beyond Hiroshima’, thru an 18 minute title part evoking the ‘Fantasia’ score, and onto a pair of devastating vignettes, it frames Ra at a peak of his elemental might and frankly blows our tiny minds to smithereens.
A little research tells us that Excelsior Mill existed as a venue between 1978-1989, so Ra’s show can be reliably dated to that period. That said, his use of a then-anachronistic instrument, and the music’s wild verve, hails a thrust to Ra’s work that had existed since the 1940s (circa ‘Fantasia’) and persisted in fucking with perception of time and space ’til his passing in 1993. In effect, we hear some half century of cinematic, operatic, classical and jazz forms collapsed into the music’s head-swallowing black holes of Afro-futurist sturm und drang.
Boldly utilising the Wurlitzer like an early synthesiser, as intended, Sun Ra deploys the classic pipe organ as particle and concept accelerator for his unparalleled imagination. In the jaw-dropping ‘Beyond Hiroshima’ he dials up a common theme in his music, of nuclear threat, to frightening degrees with walls of brassy terror reminding to ‘Fantasia’ as much as the A-bomb scene of Lynch’s Twin Peaks S3, before yoking back a little in the tile piece to play around with the organ’s percussive carillon sounds, only to rag minds thru asteroid fields of noise and orchestral bombast that he distills in the 3’ ‘Wurlitzer’ and somewhere closer to a possessed live player for a ball game in ‘Excelsior Terminus’.
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Boomkat Product Review:
Sun Ra knocks heads clean-off with his astonishing Wurlitzer organ recordings made at a legendary Atlanta club in 1984 and previously unreleased, vamping like a ‘50s horror score or entrance/theme music for a futuristic cult leader-cum-apocalyptic prophet. Out of this world!!!
Somehow only issued now for the first time, ‘Excelsior Mill’ is a remarkable addition to Sun Ra’s already fearsome catalogue that was instrumental in expanding the jazz vernacular. It’s a relatively rare and utterly ravishing example of Ra dolo, using the multiple keyboards and unique qualities of the Wurlitzer organ to command a sound comparable to Bernard Hermann on PCP or the impact of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Sring’ on an unsuspecting audience. Flying from the 20 minutecalamitous clash of atonalities and brassy aggression to ‘Beyond Hiroshima’, thru an 18 minute title part evoking the ‘Fantasia’ score, and onto a pair of devastating vignettes, it frames Ra at a peak of his elemental might and frankly blows our tiny minds to smithereens.
A little research tells us that Excelsior Mill existed as a venue between 1978-1989, so Ra’s show can be reliably dated to that period. That said, his use of a then-anachronistic instrument, and the music’s wild verve, hails a thrust to Ra’s work that had existed since the 1940s (circa ‘Fantasia’) and persisted in fucking with perception of time and space ’til his passing in 1993. In effect, we hear some half century of cinematic, operatic, classical and jazz forms collapsed into the music’s head-swallowing black holes of Afro-futurist sturm und drang.
Boldly utilising the Wurlitzer like an early synthesiser, as intended, Sun Ra deploys the classic pipe organ as particle and concept accelerator for his unparalleled imagination. In the jaw-dropping ‘Beyond Hiroshima’ he dials up a common theme in his music, of nuclear threat, to frightening degrees with walls of brassy terror reminding to ‘Fantasia’ as much as the A-bomb scene of Lynch’s Twin Peaks S3, before yoking back a little in the tile piece to play around with the organ’s percussive carillon sounds, only to rag minds thru asteroid fields of noise and orchestral bombast that he distills in the 3’ ‘Wurlitzer’ and somewhere closer to a possessed live player for a ball game in ‘Excelsior Terminus’.
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