When There Is No Sun - or how to remix Sun Ra
How do you remix Sun Ra? And, more relevantly, what’s the point?
These are the questions asked - and tentatively answered - by When There Is No Sun, a new compilation from Omni Sound in which a handful of artists try to get to grips with the extravagantly cosmic work of one of jazz’s most singular artists.
Various artists have covered Sun Ra since he made his debut in the 1950s, including MC5, Yo La Tengo and Ezra Collective; and many people have sampled him. But, until the release of this compilation, there were very few examples of artists remixing Sun Ra. WhoSampled names only one, Machinedrum’s 2013 remake of Door of The Cosmos, and in a previous post I mentioned Theo Parrish’s remix remix of Saga of Resistance.
I can understand this reluctance. Where on earth do you go with a remix of Sun Ra? You can’t make a Sun Ra tune any wilder, deeper or more funky. And while you could iron out Sun Ra’s grooves for the dance floor, what’s the point? To do so would be like rounding out the edges in a cubist painting.
When There Is No Sun addresses this question in a limited, but still compelling, way. Rather than tackling the yawning depths of the Sun Ra catalogue, which stretches to more than 100 albums, the new compilation is
based on just two records from the Omni Sound catalogue: Living Sky, an album by the Sun Ra Arkestra released in 2022, two decades after Sun Ra’s death; and My Words Are Music: A Celebration of Sun Ra's Poetry, a 2023 album in which various artists, including Saul Williams and Tunde Abimpe, read Sun Ra’s verse, punctuated by electronic interludes from long-time Sun Ra Arkestra leader Marshall Allen.
Sun Ra himself, then, is both all over this album, in inspiration, words and feelings; and curiously absent, in that none of his music actually features here. (In principle, anyway: I suspect some of the producers may have sampled his work.) That sounds like a criticism; but it’s not. It is a limitation - and a fairly serious one at that - but maybe this album needed a limitation in order to exist.
When There Is No Sun boils down to remixes of Living Sky songs by two artists - Belfast drum & bass don Calibre and Zambian experimentalist SHE Spells Doom - and eight songs based on readings of Sun Ra’s poetry, produced by Underground Resistance, A Guy Called Gerald, Baris K, Chez Damier & Ben Vedren and Ricardo Villalobos, who curated the album.
It’s a promising, rather than essential, line up. Sun Ra himself was a pioneer of electronic production, thanks to his use of synths (all over the catalogue) and drum machine (on 1978’s Disco 3000) and electronic music, at its best, has something of Sun Ra’s cosmic experimentalism to it.
You could perhaps have argued for some slightly more outré producers - I love Chez Damier and Calibre’s music but you wouldn’t consider them living at the edge of the experimental universe - but, on the whole, these are producers who don’t settle for the lowest common denominator. (Imagine, for example, a Sun Ra tribute featuring Solomun, Adam Beyer and Maceo Plex - the mind shudders.)
For all that, When There Is No Sun is ultimately a mixed bag. Villalobos’ two takes on I Have Forgotten are long and uninspired, as if the producer drank in the elongated oddness of Sun Ra’s music but forgot all about the musicality. The fact that Tara Middleton’s reading of Sun Ra’s poetry on the two Villalobos songs is rendered largely unintelligible also strikes me as unbearably indulgent, as if Villalobos has forgotten who the album is actually about.
Baris K’s Somebody Else’s Idea, featuring Abiodun Oyewole, is both overly tidy and a mess, like a chop up of 10 unrelated Sun Ra records over a rinky-dink beat, while SHE Spells Doom’s remixes of Somebody Else’s Idea and Portrait of the Living Sky are far too solid, sticking a four / four beat under Arkestra loops to create a flattened out and dampened down take on the Sun Ra sound that no one was asking for. Chez Damier & Ben Vedren’s The Endless Realm, with Tunde Adebimpe, suffers from a similar malaise, with slivers of orchestral jazz like unwanted ornamentation against a heavy house beat and dull bass line.
The album is at its best when producers tap into the golden ration between oddness and groove. Calibre’s remix of Sun Ra Arkestra’s Chopin - itself a remake of Chopin’s Prelude in A Major - seems to defy gravity, the airy sprawl of the Arkestra’s experimental jazz forming a perfectly simpatico partnership with Calibre’s drum & bass beats, the result being both 100% Arkestra and 100% Calibre. Chez Damier & Ben Vedren’s H2H Kora mix of The Three Dimensions of Air featuring Anthony Joseph is similarly airborne, a gorgeous deep house mixture of trombone, sax and kora, over which Jospeh’s reading floats like a benevolent spirit, the perfect fusion of music and words.
The hook up between Underground Resistance and Saul Williams, on When Angels Speak and The Outer Darkness, eventually bears similar fruit. On paper, this seems like the record’s most exciting partnership, with space jazz-friendly Detroit techno legends meeting Williams’ brilliantly baritone voice. The Outer Darkness, however, is a little too clean, the song dominated by a rolling bass and conga groove that only really gets interesting half way through, when classic UR-style cosmic synth twinkles creep into the mix, things getting progressively stranger - and better - from hereon in.
When Angels Speak, meanwhile, does a fantastic job of burying its oddness deep within its grooves, like a Sun Ra Walt Disney cover or the pop apocalypse of Nuclear War. If you’re not paying attention When Angels Speak might sound underwhelming, a polite tech house bed for Williams’ fantastic reading. But if you lean in much more is revealed to the sound, with UR taking what sounds like detuned jazz and working it into a lopsided and ever-evolving groove that is worthy of Sun Ra’s brilliantly atypical musical mind.
Viewed in this way, When There Is No Sun does not have a particularly high hit ratio. But given the serious structural challenges of taking on Sun Ra’s work in the first place, emerging with three wins - three remixes that are genuinely needed -is a triumph beyond the odds and a welcome expansion of the Sun Ra universe.
How do you remix Sun Ra, then? With invention and an open-mind.
And what’s the point of all this? To keep Sun Ra eternal.
People of Barcelona, my gift to you…
… is to announce that the wonderful Nadah El Shazly, a previous Line Noise podcast guest, is playing a free gig at the Moll de Barcelona this Saturday, April 4, as part of the Art Explora Festival. I saw her live at Primavera A La Ciutat last year and she was utterly bewitching so I very much recommend you go along. And, yes, this counts as your all your birthday presents.
Some listening
Laurence Pike - Guardians of Memory
Not knowing much about Laurence Pike beyond his work with the excellent Szun Waves trio, I was surprised to find out that his new album for Balmat, Possible Utopias for Jazz Quintet, is an entirely solo work: just Pike, his beloved drums and some machines.
It’s not just the album’s name that teases the human interaction of a quintet - it’s the sound too, which suggests the reflective humanity that happens when humans get together and play, bouncing ideas off each other in loose intuitive structures. Guardians of Memory, which opens the album, is the best example of this, a melancholy piano line - jazz-y if not exactly jazz - drifting evocatively over the mix like foggy rain, while Pike chases it on his cymbals, like tip toes on a cobble street, always an agonising moment away from gathering the melody into his percussive grasp.
Maybe it’s because I went to see Ozric Tentacles last week but the new tune from Om Unit reminds me very much of another 90s free festival staple: Dreadzone. I very much doubt that’s what he was going for. But, come on, a rhythm half way between reggae stomp and jungle breakbeat? A huge, tuneful bottom end? What sounds like an oriental violin sample? It’s Dreadzone through and through, pal, and I mean this is a good way. Next week: Special Request revives Back to the Planet.
One of the things I love about dance music in 2026 is how international it is. In reality, it always was if you knew where to look - South African artists released some excellent house tunes in the early 90s, for example - but today it is undeniable to even to the most closed of minds that a lot of the best dance music is coming from countries like Brazil, South Africa and South Korea.
ZAINAB - FKA ZEEMUFFIN - was born in Lahore and raised in New York, where she has become known for her DJ sets and edits. Jadoo is her first release, for Ninja Tune’s Technicolor imprint, and it reminds me of when Peggy Gou dropped It Makes You Forget (Itgehane) on the same label. On Jadoo ZAINAB sings in a language we don’t normally associate with house music - in this case Urdu - and makes it sound like house was basically made for this stuff, her insouciant vocals floating like a small, fluffy cloud over a stomping house rhythm, with just a hint of hard rock guitar to the production.
You’re running but you’re dreaming. This is the uncanny feeling conveyed by Ceaseless Motion, the title track of Polygonia’s new EP for Timedance. The song feels like legs scrabbling on slippery rock, sounds like vintage Digital Mystikz crossed with Plastikman’s Spastik and unfurls like a drumming circle on the moon, its sound design perfectly tuned to the cosmos. Remarkable.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - with Malibu
On this week’s Line Noise podcast, I spoke to French producer Malibu (a.k.a. Barbara Braccini) ahead of her gigs in Barcelona (April 14) and Madrid (April 15) about the profound impact of her live shows, music as a diary, growing up in a small town and the loneliness of LA.
Anna Calvi - Is This All There Is?
I’m a huge fan of Anna Calvi but her cover of Computer Love, in the company of Laurie Anderson, is pretty terrible and it unsettles the general brilliant EP, Is This All There Is. I reviewed the new record for Pitchfork. “Where Anna Calvi, One Breath, and Hunter are all strong thematic works that transcend their individual songs, Is This All There Is? feels more like an afterthought than the comeback of steel and thunder you’d expect from an artist as fiercely assured as Calvi.”
The playlists
What would Sun Ra do with a playlist?
Probably wipe his nose with it.
And yet, still, I have four of them.
None of them worthy.
On Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.
On Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest.
