Cheap Atlantis (Music) (Sun Ra) Price

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Customer Reviews of Atlantis

Sound as a weapon
Certainly this album is a pretty impressive piece of work. Whilst not being a Jazz officianado when i do occasion into the realms of Jazz then Sun Ra is always the most exciting place to go. The music on this One Album alone could be seen as a precursor to many of the so-called ground-breaking groups to come covering many genre's. Throbbing Gristle even came to mind half way through the title track, whilst the violent interplay on Bimini is so complex that on 1st listen it may appear as nothing more than a practice in speed drumming. But wait, let your mind empty of preconceived notions of rhythm and melody and you'll suddenly find yourself making sense of the madness. Trying to follow the music on this album is an adventure in itself. Let the music take you and you'll find yourself in a mighty powerful place where Sun Ra pulls you into his fingertips as he crashes his Electric Piano through the spaceways of his mind. And all this from the 60's, my god you have to be kidding. My opinion is that Sun-Ra is from Saturn because surely no-one else on the planet ever sounded like this. Buy!

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Overated but good
Certainly there is some very good music on this album, but I've always thought this album was overated. The shorter pieces suffer from a lack of cohesiveness and ramble on a bit in a laid back, offhand way. They don't really go anywhere. The long centerpiece composition "Atlantis" is for the most part an organ workout for Ra and is by turns extremely aggressive, spacey and ultimately exhausting. There are some great passages but its just too long. I would recommend "The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol. 1", or the truly magical "Magic City" or "Other Planes of There" before Atlantis. Those albums all contain long compositions that are more rewarding. Heliocentric Worlds is comprised of smaller pieces that flow into one another creating in effect one long suite. I'm not saying Atlantis isn't worth having because it is, just that there are better Sun Ra albums out there that you might want to pick up first.

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Mind-expanding, but This-worldly.
This album surely breaks the traditional molds of rhythm, form and tonality. For these reasons alone it is really worth a listen; however, this is not earth-shattering or out-of-this-world music. Free jazz had been around for about 6 years, and so this experiment had been done before. It is a great recording because the listener hears it against the backdrop of one's own preconceived ideas about how music should be. If I were to describe it, I would call it "Music from a Laudromat", because it harkens (especially rhythmically) to my experience sitting in a laudromat waiting for the clothes to get done in a dryer. As the dryer spins at a constant speed the clothes inside rattle against the sides of the dryer cylinder, snaps buttons and zippers clanging against the sides at an erratic non-linear pace. If one listens to it and places one's attention upon it, it becomes a very meditative and freeing experience.