Laraaji, Sun Araw, Alex Gray @ Urban Spree | Monday, 26.05.2014

Please welcome Sun Araw for a special performance with Laraaji! Both supporting recent album releases, Sun Araw and Laraaji will play their own sets as well meld zither, electronics, acoustics, and outernational sound sources into a special live collaboration, “The Play Zone”. The project combines the unique niches of both artists, who have carved their own 21st century spiritual dimension in musical space and time.

Eternity or Bust | A short film about Laraaji

New York-based LARAAJI began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising trance-inducing jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic effects. Upon seeing him playing one night in Washington Square Park, Brian Eno invited him to record an album for his seminal Ambient series.

Laraaij went onto release a prolific series of albums for a wide variety of labels, many of which he recorded himself at home and sold as cassettes during his street performances. Most recently his career has been celebrated with the double disc retrospective Celestial Music 1970 – 2011, now set for release as a vinyl edition in 2014 on All Saints/Warp, along with specially commissioned remixes by new acolytes Sun Araw, Bee Mask, Ela Orleans, and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel.

Laraaji | Essence

Over multiple cassette releases, three EPs, six full-length albums and some arresting visual work, Cameron Stallones aka SUN ARAW has evolved as a singular purveyor of low-end psychedelia, melted afrobeat and warped dub. An excellent example of hypnagogic pop, Sun Araw’s music messes with time; his tracks never quite go anywhere while never quite staying still either.
Filled with swelling bass lines, bubbling percussion, flabby synth stabs and languid guitars, Araw’s tracks tend to merge into one another, conjuring a timeless fog.

Sun Araw | Impluvium

Sun Araw’s latest album, Belomancie (Sun Ark, 2014), self-described as an “active listening experience…not designed to accompany existing environments”, is his first album since the pointillist stumble-funk and heat-bent grooves of 2012’s The Inner Treaty, which dropped shortly after Icon Give Thank (Rvng Intl, 2012), a collaborative album between Stallones, M. Geddes Gengras and roots reggae vocal legends The Congos as part of their FRKWYS series.

Sun Araw | Belomancie

Joining the evening with a DJ-Set and on stage with Cameron Stallones is regular Sun Araw live collaborator ALEX GRAY aka DEEP MAGIC who since releasing his debut album, Solar Meditations, for cult label Not Not Fun, has gone on to record a number of longform pieces, mainly on small cassette releases including for his own Deep Tapes label.

His third album, Reflections of Most Forgotten Love (Preservation, 2013) creates a meditative realm that is somehow dynamic and driven while at the same time beautifully spacious – a patiently unfolding pursuit of spiritual grace. Alex Gray has also contributed to works by Pocahaunted and Black Eagle Child.