Tabs Out | Sun Ra and His Arkestra – Sun Ra with Pharaoh Sanders and Black Harold
Sun Ra and His Arkestra – Sun Ra with Pharaoh Sanders and Black Harold
8.9.19 by Ryan Masteller
Let’s get this straight: Sun Ra claims to be from Saturn. This is not a joke, and you can’t disprove it, even though his earthly body has succumbed to its own breaking down. He’s just left that body behind and returned from whence he came. Can you imagine someone like Bjorn Copeland claiming something like that? Chick Corea? Merzbow? Couldn’t pull it off if they tried. Sun Ra was the real deal because he was the REAL DEAL. He brought us through the present and into the future. Now we just have to somehow get out of this timeline and back to the one Sun Ra had started us down, the correct one, and we’ll be just peachy…
Fortunately, he left us a whole mess of jazz to sift through. I know some of you are scared of jazz, but that’s just foolish and reckless horsecrap. You should embrace it because it makes you a better person. It will allow you to appreciate things you normally wouldn’t appreciate. Unappreciable things. Jazz could even make you appreciate a man who said he was some Saturn, who then dropped like a million tons of jazz on the world. You should check out the Sun Ra archive on Bandcamp. It’s quite extensive.
So this document of Sun Ra’s appearance on December 31, 1964, at Judson Hall in New York has never before seen the light of day. I’ll let you read the notes on the album page so I don’t have to rehash them here, but tracks 6 through 11 ONLY appeared on the 1976 LP “Featuring Pharaoh Sanders and Black Harold,” which of course is twelve years after the session. (Sun Ra was a notoriously poor archivist of his own material.) Somehow (dark magic? Grift? Mind control? Blackmail? Nuclear threats?) Pennsylvania’s Orb Tapes got their hands on the cassette rights for this thing, and now, in 2019, FIFTY-FIVE YEARS after the original session, all tracks – not just 6 through 11 but ONE through 11 – appear on an actual physical tape. It’s like Sun Ra himself has reached all the way through time and space and made it happen.
So take it from me: buy it. Listen to it. Embrace it. Embrace jazz. It’s the Arkestra, man. What do you want me to tell you?
Edition of 200 comes in “green shells with pro pad printing, white/clear cases, pro-dubbed in realtime.” Get hopping, fools!
Tabs Out | New Batch – Never Anything Records
New Batch – Never Anything Records
8.1.19 by Ryan Masteller
When is a batch not a batch? When the tapes you’re listening to were not released together, and you jump from catalog number 47 to 49, then hit 50. It seems random, but it’s not – these were the Never Anything tapes that came in the review box.
But then again, when does a batch actually matter beyond its initial release? It doesn’t. So I don’t know why I even brought it up.
ROSS BIRDWISE – CRISIS ORDINARY
Ross Birdwise likes electricity. He’s practically addicted to it, its features, its sounds, its taste even (probably). On “Crisis Ordinary,” he worships it, as every moment of the tape has a palpable electronic patois to it – you can almost smell the ozone from soldered circuits wafting in the air. Imagine, then, Birdwise getting really close to his gear, right on top of it, right up in it, and utilizing the tiniest fragments of it to compose the most micro electronic tunes, those that fidget on the edges of vision and vibrate with current. Imagine Birdwise is using a microscope. Imagine he’s having a dialogue with whatever it is he’s tinkering with. “Crisis Ordinary” finds the fractures in the building blocks, the corrupted source files in need of digital repair. Ross Birdwise is the technician we need for the problem we don’t know we have. So what if he’s more interested in exploring than fixing? We can just call somebody else then, I guess.
FINGER / ZABELKA / HEGRE – LIVE AT REWIRE 2018
For Benjamin Finger, Mia Zabelka, and John Hegre, collaboration was a no-brainer. Actually, I have nothing to back that statement up other than this documentation of their performance “Live at Rewire 2018,” which, if I’m reading the back of the j-card with my GOOD glasses, was “made for Concertzender Netherlands on April 6, 2018, during Rewire festival in the Hague.” (It also credits Amout Leene for recording this sucker.) But the result suggests the no-brainer aspect of the whole thing, because Finger, Zabelka, and Hegre work terrifyingly well together. Blending various synthetic and electronic instruments together and stretching them to unending lengths, the trio sculpts massive yellow-orange sound designs out of thick mists, with the soft results returning to mist after a few moments to be resculpted into something else. The mysteries of inspiration abound, but they swirl continuously like an alien sea made up of something other than liquid. “Live at Rewire 2018” finds a shared headspace among its performers, and the stunning output is clearly formed at a molecular level.
NATE SCHEIBLE – INDICES
Data’s worth nothing if it’s not organized. DC stalwart Nate Scheible has provided us the key, the indices, or rather “Indices,” to absorb and reflect properly upon that data. The ambient maestro’s latest finds him exploring vast corridors of card-catalogued data, corridors you can totally spend the rest of your life in, referencing, reorganizing, researching. Sometimes you may be surprised at what you find. At others, you may find yourself zoning out until you shake yourself out of it hours later. But no matter where you are along “Indices’” timeline, you’re beset on all sides by absolute frickin’ magic. You can feel it in the air. Ancient knowledge and secrets are just at your fingertips, and all you have to do is open up a drawer and take a look. Scheible knows what sort of powers he’s wielding, and he lets his work stretch open, ever outward. Even when it feels insular, “Indices” works upon the internal in inconceivably grand ways. Quiet ways, sure, but still awfully grand.
7.31.19 by Ryan Masteller