Sun Ra fragments healed via RealAudio playlist

You may recall my inaugural post in which I lamented the grisly destruction of a Sun Ra LP depicted in Mike Lupica’s film. You may even recall that, in the midst of some overblown theatrics during Sun Ra Radio on KWLC, I resurrected tracks from the album via the WFMU archives and promised to share the process on this blog. Now, a over month later, I’m making good on that promise.

Direct from the WFMU archives, previously recorded, and in stereo, here are the last three tracks from Sun Ra’s The Solar Myth Approach, Volume 1 in a RealAudio format.

For some of you, how I put this together may be more compelling than the music. So here is how I did it.

1. I searched WFMU for shows that played cuts from the album.
2. Copied the URL of the RealAudio file for that show.
3. Noted the start and end times of parts of the show I wanted to excerpt.
4. Added those times to the URL as explained in Jon Udell’s “MP3 Ins and Outs”.
5. Added the newly augmented URL to my RealAudio playlist.
6. Repeated the above steps until finished.
7. Uploaded it for your pleasure.

Not only did I include the music, but I included an opening announcement about WFMU by Trouble as well as each DJ announcing the song used from their show at the end.

Here is an annotated version of the playlist file.

With a simple text editor, I was able to control the way I wanted to cut up and arrange material from WFMU’s vast archives down to the second. I was drunk with power. I felt like a god. It was kind of fun.