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Human’s Steve Davis and sound artist Paul Stapleton next week direct a band that might well have been beamed down from Saturn, appearing as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast. The QUBe Myth-Science Space Arkestra perform the music of Sun Ra following hard on the heels of Ra-influenced Alexander Hawkins and his organ trio Decoy’s appearance at the Brilliant Corners festival in March. Davis, also a member of improv trailblazers Bourne/Davis/Kane who were announced last week as artists for the 2014 New Music Biennial, debuted with his own band Human on Being Human earlier this year to acclaim, a band and record that also includes Alexander Hawkins.  

Paul Stapleton from Southern California, now based in Belfast, designs and performs with a variety of modular metallic sound sculptures, custom made electronics, found objects and guitars, and has been lecturing at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University where he teaches and supervises postgraduate research in performance technologies, interaction design and site-specific art.

QUBe, which riffs on the university’s name, is a 16-piece band of improvisers and experimental musicians, who take the Afro-futuristic sound of Sun Ra as their cue. Born Herman Blount in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, known as Sonny in his early career Graham Lock in The Wire has written: “Certainly the name Sun Ra derives from Ra, sun god of ancient Egypt, one of the poles of the Ra cosmology.” But after the keyboardist, pianist, bandleader and composer left the planet in 1993, headed presumably for Saturn, a new generation of heavily influenced improvisers refer to him these days invariably as Ra, and play his music to ever bigger audiences with deep affection.

The Sun Ra Arkestra under former Ra associate Marshall Allen continue to carry the flame playing concerts around the world, and with Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra also keeping Ra’s cosmic sounds alive over the last seven years, QUBe follow in their footsteps. For this concert they have reimagined material such as ‘Space is the Place’ (title track of the eponymous 1973 album), ‘Enlightenment’ (from 1959 album Jazz in Silhouette), as well as the devastating call and response of ‘Nuclear War’ from the 1980s album of the same name. Drawing on hip hop, New Orleans brass, lower east side experimentalism, electronica and noise, also expect unusual stage clothes and instruments, and maybe a little dancing thrown in for good measure. MB
Sun Ra top and Steve Davis above
Thursday 9 May, www.themaclive.com