CD & DVD review: Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra – Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack) – 2023: Video, Cover

This cosmic carton combination contains three different color LPs, one containing about 40 minutes of unissued Sun Ra studio recordings, a BluRay & DVD of the entire film, and a large booklet with notes from multiple Afrofuturism scholars! Cocooned inside an Outer Space Employment Agency tote bag!

Includes unlimited streaming of Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

A celestial journey is just what Sun Ra and his Arkestra have created with Space is the Place. Sun Ra’s opus is at its simplest, a trip through outer bound melodies! Planetary bodies, eras in time, crystals, space caravans… Allow yourself to envision or feel a world away!

Featuring an album’s worth of previously unissued recordings from the same soundtrack sessions! These newly discovered tracks are heavy on the prose of Sun Ra, as he and June Tyson bestow countless bits of information and inspiration onto the listener.

This deluxe package includes 3 LPs (or two CDs), a BluRay Disc, and a DVD. The audio portion contains the original music composed for the film, which was eventually released as a soundtrack in 1993. It also features The Mathematics Of The Altered Destiny a third previously unissued LP recorded in the same soundtrack sessions but is finally being released half a century after it was recorded. This newly discovered LP is heavy on the prose of Sun Ra, as he and June Tyson bestow countless bits of information and inspiration onto the listener. The film soundtrack is an entirely different journey than the 1973 Blue Thumb LP it shares its title with. We suggest you take both journeys. These recordings were sourced from the Sun Ra tape vault, then were digitally restored to make an album this special sound the best it possibly could.

The BluRay contains the entire glorious film complete with film artifacts, and was sourced from the restoration prepared by Rapid Eye Movies of Germany. The bonus features on the BluRay are composed of Ra and Ra-centric material from the Modern Harmonic archives, including video from the Outer Space Visual Communicator footage.

This month marked the 109th anniversary of Sun Ra’s arrival on earth. As such, it’s a fine time to revisit the soundtrack to the iconoclast’s 1974 Afrofuturist science fiction film, Space Is The Place.

The Sundazed label has it covered via their new boxed set, Sun Ra & His Intergalactic Solar Arkestra: Space Is The Place (Music From The Original Soundtrack). Comprised of three LPs, DVD/BluRay discs of the film (paired with bonus content) and an eight page book, this new set is definitive. Along with the music originally released as a companion to the film, the set gathers previously unreleased recordings, sourced from the Sun Ra tape vault, cut during the San Francisco sessions in early 1972. As always, we travel the spaceways …