Bleep

Strut and Art Yard present a special release for Record Store Day 2017, the first ever official reissue of Sun Ra’s revered Discipline 27-II LP from 1972.

The recordings for the album took place on the 19 and 20 October 1972 at Streeterville Studios, Chicago, with the largest Arkestra line-up Sun Ra had yet taken into a studio session. The date was produced by Impulse! and Riverside veteran Ed Michel and, for the first time, the Arkestra was recorded in quadraphonic sound.

Of the two releases eventually prepared from the session, Space Is The Place initially stole the limelight, becoming one of the Arkestra’s most celebrated records. Discipline 27-II, by contrast, would remain a somewhat mysterious occult twin. Although it was one of the few Saturn releases to feature a full colour cover, the album featured slight differences to the master, cover and labels on a series of different pressings.

The album opens with ‘Pan-Afro’, a chugging, skittering post-bop excursion in 6/4, featuring a solo by John Gilmore followed by the dirge-like ‘Discipline 8’ and the smoky, avant-blues classic ‘Neptune’, blessed by a scrawling Marshall Allen solo. Perhaps the album’s main event is a stately performance of ‘Discipline 27-II’, launching the listener into the deep poetics of the astro-black mythos. Echoed closely by June Tyson, and then by the rest of the Space Ethnic Voices, Ra moves from an explanation of his mission and a reproach to the people of Earth, before offering incantations to the angel realm. ‘We got some news for you,’ he advises wryly: ‘the world ended three thousand years ago.’ We are all stranded on ‘the other side of the end of time’, in a world that already ended three millennia back, at the end of the Egyptian New Kingdom. It’s after the end of the world!

This first official reissue of Discipline 27-II was prepared in conjunction with Art Yard and Sun Ra LLC. The album is restored from the original master tapes and features complete original artwork and new sleeve notes by Francis Gooding.