Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow

Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow
Studio album by Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra
Released	1965 [1]
Recorded	1961–1962, New York
Genre	Jazz
Length	34:06
Label	Saturn Evidence
Producer	Alton Abraham
Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra chronology
Bad and Beautiful (1961) Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow (1965) Secrets of the Sun (1962)

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
CD AllMusic	[2]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[3]

Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow is an album by the American jazz musician Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. Often considered the first of Ra's 'outside' recordings,^[4] the album was the first to make extensive use of a discovery by the Arkestra's drummer and engineer Tommy Hunter:

'Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow.... contained "Cluster of Galaxies" and "Solar Drums", two rhythm section exercises with the sound treated with such strange reverberations that they threatened to obliterate the instruments' identity and turn the music into low-budget musique concrète. While testing the tape recorder when the musicians were tuning up one day, Hunter had discovered that if he recorded with the earphones on, he could run a cable from the output jack back into the input on the recorder and produce massive reverberation:

"I wasn't sure what Sun Ra would think of it... I thought he might be mad - but he loved it. It blew his mind! By working the volume of the output on the playback I could control the effect, make it fast or slow, drop it out, or whatever." [Tommy Hunter]

'By the 1950s commercial recording companies had developed a classical style of recording which assured that the recording process itself would be invisible... but Sun Ra began to regularly violate this convention on the Saturn releases by recording live at strange sites, by using feedback, distortion, high delay or reverb, unusual microphone placement, abrupt fades or edits, and any number of other effects or noises which called attention to the recording process. On some recordings you could hear a phone ringing, or someone walking near the microphone. It was a rough style of production, an antistyle, a self-reflexive approach which anticipates both free jazz recording conventions and punk production to come.' John F Szwed ^[5]

The sleeve was designed by Sun Ra. When re-issued on compact disc by Evidence in 1992, the album was joined with the contemporaneous Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy.