1.5-Hour Sun Ra v. Hip-Hop MP3 Megamix
Been wondering when you might get your hands on an hour-and-half mix of hip-hop producers cut’n'pasting old Sun Ra records. Sure you have. Well, such a glorious thing is available now, for free download, courtesy of the instrumental-hip-hop mavens at rhythm-incursions.com. Sun Ra, progenitor of outer-space jazz and free-rein collective improvisation, is both a fitting and challenging subject for remixing — fitting, in that his work was groove-heavy, rich in sonic touches, and a natural subject for producers who fancy themselves crate diggers, sifting through cultural detritus in search of lost grooves; challenging, in that his work, like his life, had relatively little formal structure, and thus the mechanical beat of hip-hop has to make peace with tempos that give and take. The producers here do their best, on a voluminous number of tracks, as the following set list attests:
- Electric Egypt “the invisible spectrum” • Ras_G “jouful noise!!!” • Space Monk “hello sun ra” • Afro Bluu “all systems go” • SoulJim “sun ra beat” • Ichiro “mori” • Movementss “cosmos” • Powell “popcorn contact” • Skipless “sometimes the universe speech” • Samon Kawamura “antique black” • Sauce “travel” • SK.ILL “5:49 in the a.m.” • Blak Maul “china gate” • Space Monk “majestic waves” • Stevo “into the sun” • Sudan Life “what i learned from le sony’r” • Elaquent “calling planet earth” • The Billion Dollar Quartet “sun ra project” • Cozmos “one for the sun” • Infinite Potentials “not like planet earth” • SK.ILL “graveyard planet” • -G-R-A-D-E- “summer in paris • Ravage Beats 2012 sun ra 2012 mix” • Don Bo “anhk” • Blunted Monks “lars vertoht de sun ra et” • Samon Kawamura “imagination” • Soul Kid “shine like the sun” • SoulJim “Moon Shoes” • -G-R-A-D-E- “bad character” • Dank Grooves “the final sun” • Jomac “sun rawness” • The Samurai “i am sun ra” • Depakote “one for the sun” • Sun Ra “space is the place (Live)
The full set is available as a Zip archive from two different URLs currently: rhythm-incursions.com, sendspace.com. It comes as one single, lengthy MP3, which makes coordinating tracks with the above list somewhat complicated — but of course, if it weren’t somewhat messy and confusing, it really would be true to Sun Ra. (Credit is due to twitter.com/scaloni, which first tipped off Rhythm Incursions about the existence of this collection.)
awesome :-) thx for this heads up!