*Limited initial copies

Twenty years after its first publication, Art Yard are proud to present the revised 3rd edition of Hartmut Geerken's long unobtainable Omniverse Sun Ra, a definitive hitch-hiker's guide to the Sun Ra galaxy. 304 full colour pages / 1850 gramms - Size: 290mm x 245mm Portrait. TIP!!
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The new, completely revised edition features:

Unpublished photographs of Sun Ra and the Arkestra by Hartmut Geerken and Val Wilmer.

Fully revised discography by Chris Trent, co-author of The Earthly Recordings of Sun Ra.

Articles by Geerken, Amiri Baraka, Chris Cutler, Robert L. Campbell, Salah Ragab, Gabi Geist and others.

New full colour images of hundreds of Sun Ra album covers, posters, handbills and ephemera, including reproductions of rare hand drawn and coloured LP sleeves.

For five decades, Sun Ra brightened planet Earth with his unique, provocative and esoteric musical philosophy. Touring the world with his formidable Arkestra, he represented and affirmed a new vision of Black history and culture, embodied and spread a new and powerfully influential Black philosophy, and revolutionised music with sounds from beyond the purple star zone.

Ra accepted no limitation imposed on him by earthly powers: his vista was the universe, his travel was interplanetary, his music borne along the spaceways as he delivered messages of light to a sleeping world. Now more than ever, the value and radicalism of his protean musical inventiveness, his socially collective self-determination, and his philosophical and poetic profundity can be seen. Where Ra went, we are slowly going, and we will find his message for us waiting there.

The new edition of Omniverse Sun Ra is a major contribution to Sun Ra studies, and a dazzling overview of its subjects astonishingly productive career on Earth the definitive companion to the many worlds of Sun Ra.

Omniverse Sun Ra
Hartmut Geerken and Chris Trent. 304 Pages. Binding: French fold cover, metallic foil blocking on Faimei cloth hardback. Size: 290mm x 245mm Portrait. With many previously un-published photographs of Sun Ra and His Arkestra in New York 1966 and Germany 1979 by Val Wilmer and Hartmut Geerken's previously un-published photographs from Heliopolis Cairo Egypt 1971. Updated Discography by Chris Trent. Comprehensive pictorial and annotated discography, including chronological discography and alphabetical record title, composition, personnel and record label indexes. Shellac Records, 78RPM indexes, 45 RPM Singles indexes. Jackets and Labels indexes. Essays, photo documents by Hartmut Geerken, Val Wilmer, Amiri Baraka, Robert L. Campbell, Chris Cutler, Gabi Geist, Sigrid Hauff, Karl Heinz Kessler, Robert Lax and Salah Ragab.

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

Repress!

The album Angels And Demons At Play was compiled from two different sessions, recorded four years apart (1956 and 1960), that reflect Sun Ra's evolution from hard Chicago bop towards exotic styles that transcended easy categorization. The album was released in 1965 with a distinctive sleeve design by Sun Ra, featuring an identical illustration on both sides, and no sleeve notes. Besides the leader, there's overlapping personnel at the two sessions, yet the two LP sides were somewhat incongruous, demonstrating how much the Arkestra had evolved in four years.

Side A (tracks 1–4) consists of four performances from the marathon 1960 Chicago recording session that produced dozens of tracks released over the subsequent decade on a series of Saturn releases. Two idiosyncratic works, "Tiny Pyramids" and the title track (the latter featuring a flute solo by Marshall Allen), were composed by bassist Ronnie Boykins. "Between Two Worlds," a Sun Ra original, is a short, springy cha-cha. The colorfully abstract "Music From The World Tomorrow," featuring Sun Ra on Cosmic Tone Organ and Phil Cohran on "violin-uke," is the album's revelation — a short "sound experiment" rather than a composition, hinting more than any work on the collection Sunny's future direction.

The B-side of the album (tracks 5–8) goes back to the 1956 first Arkestra sessions, featuring Sunny's emerging "Hard Space Bop." The work is solid, and representative of the foundational years of the Sun Ra legacy. Three of the tracks had been released as singles by Saturn.

The respective sides document two early periods of Sun Ra's musical trajectory. But by the time the album was released in 1965, neither side accurately reflected what Sun Ra was offering fans on the concert stage or on new album releases, much less where his music would head as the decade continued to unfold. Compare Angels and Demons to the albums Strange Strings (recorded 1965) and Atlantis (recorded 1967-68), which sonically and stylistically are, as Sun Ra might say, "from another planet."

Side Epic - Track 1: Sun Ra and His Arkestra - featuring Marshall Allen : Angels and Demons at Play / running time: 2.57 cut at 33rpm [ recorded in 1960 ]

Side Epic - Track 2: Sun Ra and His Arkestra - featuring Marshall Allen : Between Two Worlds / running time: 1.58 cut at 33rpm [ recorded in 1960 ]

Side Cosmic - Sun Ra and His Arkestra - featuring Marshall Allen : Spontaneous Simplicity / running time: 7.58 cut at 33rpm [ recorded in 1966 ]

Pressed as a heavy weight single 70g with a picture sleeve.

Copyright Sun Ra LLC / Publishing Enterplanetary Koncepts.
© Art Yard Ltd 2021

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More