Sun Ra – Stray Voltage

“Greetings, Sun Ra voyagers! We commence with a caveat: If you’re looking for melodies, structured compositions, pleasant harmonies, songs you can whistle, and serenades for social gatherings — seek elsewhere.

This is Triple-A Ra: Audacious, Aggressive, Adventurous. In the collection we’ve titled Stray Voltage, Ra is not so much composing music as painting soundscapes with electronic keyboards. Ra doesn’t simply play these consoles — he attacks, cajoles, and pounds them. He upends and transports them where they weren’t built to go. Sometimes they fracture under his assault. He steers them into the zone of intimacy and combat. They emit whirrs, hums, jolts and squiggles, crowned by explosions. Ra’s repertoire includes feedback, distortion, torrents, and mysterious beeps from far-off planets. With one keystroke Ra could trigger a sonic apocalypse.

These performances might sound like they were generated by machines, but there was a robed wizard at the controls. Ra turns this musical circuitry into compressors and transformers, dynamos and turbines. He updates George Antheil for the Space Age.

These works also have the character of soundtracks for non-existent films. There is tension and mystery, chaos and disorientation. There are ominous crescendos, futuristic forebodings, and thematic non sequiturs. Animation, science fiction, surrealistic noir — listen to these works with your eyes shut, or in a darkened room, and imagine the action.

On these tracks there’s music redefined, science repurposed — and journeys into the cosmic darkness. Some call it noise. Noise can be music too. It might not sound like earthly music, but that’s because Space Pilot Sun Ra intended to take you on a pangalactic excursion, for which he created the mixtape.

When Ra obtained a new electronic instrument, it’s doubtful he read the instruction manual. He just switched it on and went to work, his paws tentatively probing it like a cat kneading a couch. The designers might have proposed a best-way to play. Ra ignored their tutorials — his understanding was intuitive. Once he became familiar with the action of the keys and the effects of the pre-sets, the real drama began. As recounted in the 2017 reissue notes for My Brother, The Wind, Vol. 1, a 1969 all-Moog synth session, an employee from the R.A. Moog Company attended an Arkestra concert in NYC to see the maestro onstage with his recently acquired Minimoog. The onlooker reported that Ra “had not understood how the device was supposed to work or what it really ought to do (and the instrument appeared quite nearly broken),” but he proclaimed that “Sun Ra was the most exciting and captivating Moog performer he’d ever witnessed.”

There is no consistency to Stray Voltage — it’s a cornucopia. Stylistically, these tracks capture Ra’s electronic peregrinations during the 1970s and ’80s. The Arkestra — or one or two players — occasionally makes a cameo appearance. But Ra commands the spotlight.

A couple of these recordings originated at 1985 gigs at the club Staches, in Columbus, Ohio. Two are from a 1985 lecture series at Berkeley, another from a 1988 concert at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz. A few were likely recorded at Ra’s Philadelphia home. Others are of unknown provenance.

A few actual titles were scribbled on tapes, e.g. “Fourth Dimension,” “Manhattan Undertones,” and “Projection of Equation Infinity.” Others had to be assigned names for publishing purposes. Using the Stray Voltage album title as a marker, we added a number which corresponded to the tape inventory, and appended words of ambiguity. Because with Ra, a Master of Misdirection, you can never be certain. There’s one cover — a rumpled mutation of the 1933 Otto Harbach-Jerome Kern Tin Pan Alley standard “Yesterdays,” sundered by Ra’s frisky fingerwork, which would have rendered it unrecognizable to the composers.

To the best of our knowledge, the only tracks in this collection which had been previously available are the two Berkeley DX-7 Etudes, which appeared on a limited-run 2006 CD compiled by Ra historians John and Peter Hinds as a supplement to their Sun Ra Research fanzine series.

We’ve often said that with Sun Ra, you get everything except consistency and predictability. The core quality in these electronic expeditions is confidence. In his journeys through inner and outer space, Ra didn’t need a GPS: he knew where he was going and knew how to get there. In that place, they are whistling these tunes.”

— Irwin Chusid