The June Tyson Sessions by Nick Bazzano

http://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand-articles/the-june-tyson-sessions-remixperiments-with-vocal-materiality-and-the-becoming-woman-of-cosmic-music.html

A collaboration between Alex Silva (https://soundcloud.com/faceofman, http://alexsilvamusic.com/), Willie Avendano (https://soundcloud.com/willieavendano, https://soundcloud.com/selfies) and myself, "The June Tyson Sessions" is an abstract experimental sound project produced solely from vocal samples of June Tyson, often credited as "U Other Space Ethnic Voice" when performing as the lead vocalist for Sun Ra's various "arkestras" and free-jazz performance outfits. June Tyson's vocal performances have been praised by musicians and thinkers from Sun Ra himself to Amiri Baraka to John Cage, Kodwo Eshun and beyond, as that which propels Ra's work "out there," as the improvisatory female voice through which "sometimes the Universe speaks," and the performative female embodiment of Sun Ra's "myth-science Alter-destiny." However, in multiple interviews, Tyson reveals that often she performed in a "do-as-told" mode, with Sun Ra literally whispering his cosmic philosophies to her on stage word-for-word, providing the linguistic incantations to be ritualistically performed.

This project asks if there is some way that Tyson's voice can be deterretorialized and reconstituted so as to parse out the distinct materialities and vitalities that enable her sonic performances to resonate in such a speculative and affirmative realm. We are interested in separating June Tyson's voice from Sun Ra's hegemonic thought-control in a move of feminist and queer reactivation and affirmation. The key to this strategy comes in treating the vocal samples as objects exhibiting their own set of affects and allures, their own performative potentialities, their own array of contingencies to be folded over and twisted around each other in a process of revealing their speculative potential and our complicity with their immanent material-discursive behaviors and vitalities. Affectively and effectively, this project seeks to rematerialize June Tyson as a cosmic artisan, creator of forces and arranger of forms. This is a queering of vocality and sonic materiality through the experimental creation of multiple questions, answers and sono-speculative resonances. "The June Tyson Sessions" aims to enable a queer feminist recalibration of the performativity of the materiality of the voice of June Tyson, showing that there's much more to Tyson's "Other Space Ethnic Voice" than the man whispering his cosmic-Afrogospels in her ear....