Revolutionary Arts Ensemble journey the cosmos with the progenitor of afrofuturism…SUN RA!!! Recorded live at the Hastings Pipe Band Hall October 12 2019 as part of the Hastings Fringe Festival.



Bad day at the TAB? Aunty Melissa thinks you’re a loser? Eating creamed rice for pudding, out of the TIN?! Well, why don’t you leave earth? That’s right: get the eff off terra firma! When flying with the Revolutionary Arts Ensemble you’ll enjoy astounding-ly good company, amazing-ly seductive aural stimulation, and Fantastic-ly kung-phooey fare.
Join this adventurous troop of musicians: Captain Adrian Thornton (bass/ideology), Chief Navigator Willie Devine (MoogerFooger), Electrical Modulations Officer Vinnie Beaumont (string sextant), Lt. Commander Max Parkes & Lt. Commander Joe Dobson (nuclear fusionistas) and ship’s doctors Will Darbyshire & Anton Wuts (hornstars), as they take you on a ride through the omniverse of Sun Ra via the planets Mingus, Ayler and Coleman.
As the great Stephen Hawking once said, “BE CURIOUS”…

Gig review:
12 October 2019, Fringe in the ‘Stings, by Bridie Freeman.

Nine-thirty at night at the Pipe Band Hall, and all who enter must be initiated into the Revolutionary Arts Ensemble’s show. Punters line up in drizzle to be adorned with face paint: third eyes, sparkly bindis, spinning planets on their brows and cheeks. There’s happy acquiescence, no one demurs, for this is the pinnacle of Fringe; who wouldn’t want to join the cult?

There are smoke machines and silver foil wrapping the prim walls of the 1950s community hall, an intergalactic star like a sunflower, running film in its centre – floating rubber gloves, underwater plants, trees, blossom; spliced images from the works of experimental, Afrofuturist jazz musician Sun Ra (to whom this show pays homage): the Egyptian sun god Ra, freaky space imagery. Costumes: Willie Devine like a shaman at the keys; Anton Wuts, wearing 3D glasses, a suit wrapped in winking fairy lights; drummer Joe Dobson with a hat like a lampshade, torches on his wrists; Max Parkes in a foil kaftan, with an extraction fan pipe pinning down (for a minute) his mop of hair. There’s a fan spinning out streamers, and homemade touches of weirdness. Delightful painted cardboard cut-outs (aeronaut skeletons) by artist and bassist Adrian Thornton.

We Travel the Spaceways is an exuberant, riotously joyous, crazy ride. Half the room is dancing – expressive, intuitive movements to music that’s shapeshifting unpredictably through an eclectic register of inspirations – jazz, funk, folk tunes, even pipe band riffs, art deco swing, metal – accentuated with audio intersplicings from Sun Ra’s trippy, esoteric teachings.  But for all its wild, seemingly impulsive swerves and about-turn changes, there’s a taut, compulsive current to the music that pulls momentum ever onwards. And a pattern of well-crafted arrangements, with refrains, like songs.

Asked to describe the genre of music Revolutionary Arts Ensemble perform, Anton has proclaimed it Hasting Folk. And while it’s easy to chuckle – folk, what?! – there’s a truth to it. It’s infused by the very place it’s created and performed within – quite specifically, Hastings’ east block. Part of the reason the Revolutionary Arts Ensemble experience is so ecstatically, resonantly uplifting, I’m sure, is the feeling that this is ours – a truly homegrown collaborative arts revolution that, while traversing galactic influences, musically, artistically, creatively, is not trying to be elsewhere but proudly speaks to, and is manifestly of, our wee, hyperlocal corner of the world.