** 2CD with expanded artwork in a 8-panel double digipak comes with an 8-page booklet featuring a new essay by Gydja ** Strange City is a collision that feels both improbable and utterly logical: officially licensed from the Sun Ra estate, it invites Masami Akita's Merzbow to enter the archive of Sun Ra and pull out rare and unreleased material as fuel for some of his most cosmically charged noise. Negotiated directly with Irwin Chusid on behalf of the estate, the project begins with fragments of Ra’s universe - stray horns, stray rhythms, stray flashes of the Arkestra’s energy - and submits them to Merzbow’s singular process of overload. The result is not a polite remix project, but a set of works in which Sun Ra’s jazz power is carried into brutal excess: shards of swing and chant buried, exposed, and blurred inside vast, seething fields of distortion.
Originally issued by Cold Spring a decade ago and quickly sold out, Strange City first appeared split across vinyl and CD, with each format containing different music. That fragmentation suited the material’s mutating character but kept the full picture out of reach. This new edition gathers all tracks together for the first time, returning to the original masters and sequencing them in the order originally envisioned before side lengths and cutting constraints intervened. Heard this way, the album resolves into a single, unruly suite: an extended traversal from Ra’s crowded bandstands to Merzbow’s incandescent data storms, where motifs, percussion and horn calls occasionally float to the surface only to be swept back into the noise.
What grounds the record is the sense that neither figure is reduced to cameo. The constant, destructive waves of saturation and feedback decisively mark this as a Merzbow work, but buried within its grain is a recognisable cosmic mood and a pulse that clearly belongs to Sun Ra’s DNA. It’s as if the Arkestra’s layered rhythms and chants have been exploded at a molecular level and then reassembled into abstract weather systems. Snatches of ensemble attack, stray piano clusters or drum accents register less as quotations and more as ghosts, flickering inside Merzbow’s maximal textures like encoded messages from Saturn.
The new edition also includes, for the first time on any physical release, the two‑minute piece “Granular Jazz Part 5,” a special composition originally created for Stuart Maconie’s “Freak Zone” on BBC Radio 6. Broadcast only once to herald Merzbow’s 2016 appearance at Manchester’s FAC251, it now folds back into the Strange City continuum as a concise, hyper‑condensed statement of intent: a flash of shattered jazz DNA suspended in crackling, pointillist noise. Its inclusion underscores the project’s broader ambition - to treat Sun Ra’s legacy not as a museum piece, but as volatile matter still capable of reacting explosively with new forms.
In bringing these worlds into contact, Strange City functions as more than a curiosity or a crossover footnote. It sketches an oblique bridge between two visions of sonic freedom: Sun Ra’s insistence on music as interstellar myth‑science, and Merzbow’s devotion to noise as unbounded energy, free from song form and decorum. The record does not reconcile these approaches so much as let them interfere with each other, generating a space where jazz, improvisation and harsh electronics coexist in unstable equilibrium. Longtime devotees of either artist will find new angles on both; newcomers may experience it as a single, overwhelming organism of sound, at once astral and abrasive.
Reassembled from scattered formats, augmented with a once‑vanishing broadcast, Strange City stands now as the definitive document of this unlikely orbit. It testifies to the fact that Sun Ra’s music continues to mutate far beyond his physical lifetime, and that Merzbow’s noise, for all its extremity, remains porous to histories and spirits that move through it. In this city, the streets are built from feedback, the air is thick with horns, and time runs in spirals rather than straight lines.
