This is the 10th anniversary 2 cd re-issue of Strange City the collaboration between the Sun Ra Archive and Merzbow, the former licensed some unreleased Sun Ra tapes to be re-mixed and treated by Merzbow AKA Masami Akita and this double cd is the result, this is the full session and in the correct order, that was not possible to release on Vinyl. This is easily the most unlistenable Sun Ra album I've heard and I own about 100 of his records. The Music is by Masami Akita, A deformed mix of Sun Ra's Strange Strings & The Magic City with additional Merzbow material. Recorded & mixed at Munemihouse, Tokyo, May 2016, Strange Strings & The Magic City composed by Sun Ra Enterplanetary Koncepts (BMI), Original Sun Ra Recordings Remastered by Michael D. Anderson and Irwin Chusid, Granular Jazz Part 5 created for BBC 6 Music, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone Mastered by Martin Bowes at The Cage.
The album opens with Livid Sun Loop that is 32 minutes of hailstorms of feedback and noise with brass being blown atonally over the top, this is a heavy hard and difficult in the extreme listening experience, crackling interference and screeds of sound that are like, you keep pulling the wires in and out on a badly maintained amp, there is no subtlety in this maelstrom of noise and very little let up. Deep distressed tonalities harshly treated with hurricanes of faulty air conditioners, buzzing over the horns and destroying the syncopation. The bowels of the earth have opened up and swallowed the listener, who may feel like they are in an aural torture chamber, the sounds jump and cut and scythe through your mind. Frequency modulators distort your brain and the sounds of anything approaching normality. At the 15-minute mark the main noise drops out, leaving the phasers battling it out over rumbling distractions before the noise builds back up, static and destructive, terror filled chainsaw percussion brutalize the mind.
Before the infinity space drumming starts to emerge, only to be eviscerated in the wailing cacophonous screeds of noise. The phasers return to do battle once more, clattering walls of the sort of interference you got when you could manually tune a tv channel and were in between channels. Suddenly a swarm of wasps buzz into view dancing between the phasers and general uncomfortable noise that eventually fades out.
The rest of the Double album is taken up with Granular Jazz parts 1-5, Granular Jazz Part 1 opens with the Arkestra more front and centre but with the phasers and other weird noises obliterating the melodies and harmonies oscillating into insanity and inanity, grinding your mind into submission to the carful bass tones chiming like a clock beneath the screeds of sound. Wowing and fluttering fans distract what grains of sanity you had before entering this maelstrom. Ringing noises rise through the vortex of noise like alarm bells for the end of humanity. Piercing noises and dentist drills pummel at the cortex of your mind, the insanity just doesn't let up no matter how gamelan the percussion underneath may seem to be. The tape keeps playing on fast forward, Morse code messages dot and dash away, what can the message be, turn that noise off now for something more astral taking us from planet to planet.
The second cd opens with granular Jazz pt 2 the immense 34-minute central part of this immersive noise tinnitus breeding ground of apocalyptic sound, metastasizing bleeped interference into wailing extremes of feedback including aural hallucinations, that under here somewhere is some jazz we want to listen too. Is this the music they used to torture terrorists in Guantanamo with, at even moderately high volumes this will make you submit and admit to almost anything to stop the noise for just a little while, a dark distorted rhythm emerges before the train horn blows and everything is subsumed in noise once more. Finally the atonal brass warfare breaks through and does battle with the screeds of noise and distortions making Ayler seem like Kenny G, while I dream of the brass defeating the noise and letting us hear the pristine blowing. There's a bit of mid piece respite with more bells and clanging sounds the noise quelling a touch, cowbells to the rescue, eviscerated by noise phasers once more, finally the piano emerges from all the noise, to be quickly obliterated in interference noise and a mighty saxophone wailing behind the screeds, super intense drum solo with wood chimes and tubular bells being driven to insanity in the squalling maelstrom of noise, oh hail the feedback, waves and waves of it, high speed tube tunnel noises amped to the max like you are thrusting on all rockets on your way to space. Sirens bleep to signal the end of part 2.
Granular Jazz Part 3 is down to only 13 minutes with the piano being stamped on, rumbling bass and drums with an axle grinder and lathes gnawing away decisively, Phaser warfare has resumed along with some really annoying car alarm noises fluttering, sustaining the maelstrom and inducing the dentist drills to go all late night horror movie, did they nick Branca's percussion section, it's like Z'ev on crystal meth, before a speaker buzz and almost clear jazz outro.
Granular Jazz Part 4 is a far more concise 5 minutes with heartbeat bass tone and Scalextric or toy space gun style noises amped to the max, an almost classical undertow bring brutalized, reimagined and twisted into one of Sun Ra's keyboard frenzied cosmic tones destroying mental therapy, worm holes drawing you into the messages coded into the bleeping interference.
The album concludes with Granular Jazz Part 5 (BBC 6 Exclusive) and a mere 2 minute distillation of the previous near 2-hour onslaught of noise, this is about all a normal listener can take of such cacophony, if you are not made of strong stuff, try this sliver first and then gird your loins and listen the rest of this humungous nasty noise album.
Find out more at https://coldspring.co.uk/csr369cd https://coldspring.bandcamp.com/album/strange-city-csr369cd https://orcd.co/csr369cd https://www.sunra.com/ https://merzbow.net/ https://www.facebook.com/OfficialMerzbow
