Leslie García and the Sun Ra Archive: Specters of Saturn

El Saturn Collection contains one-of-a-kind documentation on the creative process of the African-American composer, allowing a glimpse of his rawest, most spontaneous side. In the collection—which covers a broad historical and stylistic period, beginning with his recordings from the early fifties and ending in 1993, the year of his death—recordings of rehearsals and concerts mix with sketches and sound experiments, poetry readings, lectures, hypnosis sessions and interviews. Many of the pieces—played alongside his celebrated Arkestra, as well as key collaborators such as the trumpet player Hobart Dotson or the singer June Taylor—formed part of his enormous discography of over one hundred albums (such as the classics Space is the Place, Lanquidity or Nuclear War), but many others have never been released: potential sonic pathways that were never captured in an official recording.

The archive presents a challenge for listening, selection and mediation, which Leslie García articulates in a sui generis fashion by exploring the collection’s marginalia, rather than its famous tracks or jam sessions, creating a type of sonic diary with no particular order, avoiding a strict genealogical reconstruction. In this marginalia, García encounters the phantasmagoria of the archive: the accidents of an unpolished sound document and the accidents to which the tapes were subjected due to the passing of time, before their digitalization.

All of these glitches have a personality that the composer does not attempt to hide, instead drawing our attention to them and incorporating them into the composition. She uses methods for the spectral analysis and reconstruction of sound through probabilistic and generative processes that allow for the creation of new dimensions for the manipulation of timbre.

In general terms, the piece exhibited at the Space for Sound Experimentation presents a simple dichotomy: at several key moments, the layers of synthesizers that are heard for most of Specters of Saturn reveal fragments of the unprocessed archive, establishing a counterpoint between the document and its processing. The result is a type of mottled space that allows the ear to jump freely between eras, composers and textures, opening up a portal to what Sun Ra called other planes of there, bifurcations in time that he also conceptualized as alterdestinies.

Rather than operating through continuities, genealogies and retentions, Specters of Saturn seeks to operate through intervals, gaps and breaks, constituting what Kodwo Eshun—one of the most penetrating readers of Sun Ra’s music—calls an alien discontinuum, allowing for the entry of new alterdestinies that could also alter the past captured in the archives.


Tapes and cassettes by Sun Ra (El Saturn Collection), processed by Leslie García
Multichannel sound installation in a loop
45 min.

Artist: Leslie García (Tijuana)
Curator: Guillermo García Pérez
Spatialization: Tobías Álvarez