Sun Ra’s Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy
written by Shaun Lee
I’d like to talk for a minute about the quality of weirdness as it applies to music. I first became attracted to the concept of unconventional sound within music upon hearing my mother refer to modern music as “nothing but noise” when I was about 8 years old. Naturally, my young mind took this phrase literally, and I assumed that my mother meant that new bands were releasing records that consisted entirely of screams, yelps and grinding white noise, occasionally punctuated by a choice expletive or two. As I was entering a phase of my life where I was becoming generally enamoured of chaos and misbehavior, this idea appealed to me tremendously, and I would spend time in my room recording what I deemed “modern music” onto my tape recorder, stuff that basically consisted of samples of noises created by various household appliances, interspersed with lewd skits and intermittentent banging and squawking. I came to listen to these home tapes more than the radio, and continued the habit until some of the more vulgar recordings were discovered by my parents and my tape recorder confiscated.
Nevertheless, this period remained my standard for interesting music, and despite discovering rock and roll in my adolescence, I continued to look for something in music that would evoke the same sounds my youthful imagination had conceived. It wasn’t until I began delving into psychedelic rock that I discovered music that finally filled this empty niche. It may have been Horse Latitudes by The Doors, or The Beatle’s Revolution #9 or The Grateful Dead’s haunting What’s Become of The Baby, but it gradually began to dawn on me that many others had conceived and executed similar concepts.
Later, in high school, I was entranced by the bizarre sounds emanating from the student hangout zone in the back of the art room. Steeling my courage, I ventured within to introduce myself to the black clad kid with the big hair, and ask him just what the hell record he was listening to. The music turned out to be the album Gift Gas by the British Industrial Noise group Throbbing Gristle. My new friend informed me that the album had been conceived by the group after the avante garde writer William S. Burroughs had presented the band with a tape recorder and advised them to apply his patented “cut-up” method to their music. So here was final confirmation of my own childhood methods, exemplified by none other than my personal literary hero! Suffice to say, this discovery engendered a rebirth of my earlier practices of home experimental recording, a practice which I dare say involved far less frustration and boredom than trying to play pop punk covers in a high school rock band.
But all this is merely to preface and frame my argument of experimental music as a vital and fascinating art form, especially when approached from a place of childlike wonder and playfulness, and to set up my argument for one of the greatest experimental albums ever recorded: The Sun Ra Arkestra’s Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy.
I thank God for my public library; almost every album that ever effected me deeply and permanently came from their stacks, most chosen randomly based on the visual appeal of the cover art. The frenetic line drawing of a wild eyed psychedelic madman amidst chaotic swirls of ethereal vapour instantly drew my eye, and the evocative title sealed the deal. I was in need of some mental therapy; high school had warped my mind and bent my soul. I’d never listened to Jazz before, but I loved it in theory. I’d heard that it was dense, difficult for people to listen to, and filled with sounds that drove squares away in droves, and most of my favourite authors sang its praises in their books. But thus far, having heard almost exclusively big band and swing, I had been utterly disappointed. Perhaps this album would be the Rosetta Stone that would unlock its esoteric mysteries for me.
I was immediately entranced. The album opened with a completely haphazard note played on a squeaking saxaphone. Momentarily it was joined by random thumping noises, and what sounded like someone washing dishes. What the shit was this? The band sounded like a special-needs class set loose in the bandroom, I laughed…but kept listening, because I had also never heard anything remotely like it. 40 seconds in, and the entire band plays a chord that sounds simply like it shouldn’t possibly exist in a sane and ordered cosmos. I’m reminded of that Lovecraft story with the alien colour that radiates impossible bands of the spectrum. Such cacaphony, and yet…it worked somehow…the sound had a visceral edge, that should have been unpleasant, but rather simply evoked a feeling of otherness, of something stange and unworldly. More series of bizarre, cloud like floating chords follow, all punctuated by the nonsensical rattling of what could only be glassware. Fully two and a half minutes of this passes before anything resembling a run of notes. The music builds to a startlng, frenetic crescendo.
On the next track, things really got interesting. Recorded in 1963, this is the first album to feature tape echo, a process involving looping the recording tape back into the machine, thus creating a feedback loop of sound like a serpent chasing its own tail. The Arkestra’s recording engineer discovered the process quite by accident; Sun Ra loved it and insisted that he drench the drums on the album in the effect. Keep in mind that this is a solid 3 years before modern psych bands began experimenting with the technique. The first time I heard it on this record it fairly blew my mind. Suffice to say, by the time I reached the end of the relatively short album, I felt myself ineffably changed. If the Arkestra had set out to stir my psyche with their cosmic tones, they had exceeded all possible expectations.
I could go on at length about all the amazing things there are to discover on this album (the meandering, philosophical adventures of Marshall Allen on his bass oboe, the deep cosmic funk of Ronnie Boykins bass, the recording studio telephone ringing in the middle of a take) but I’d much prefer to just beg you to listen. Listen to Sun Ra. The guy is not of this Earth. He’s a black Mozart from beyond the rings of Saturn, and he freaks me out!
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written by Shaun Lee
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