Boston Immersive Music Festival: Sun Ra recorded music on Thursday Oct. 17

Boston Immersive Music Festival

The seven-weekend long Boston Immersive Music Festival brings together the best of experimental, jazz, classical, and traditional music that Boston has to offer with the immersive visuals of the OVC-3D.

Sun Ra

The National Endowment for the Arts describes Sun Ra as:

An outsider who linked the African-American experience with ancient Egyptian mythology and outer space, Sun Ra was years ahead of all other avant-garde musicians in his experimentation with sound and instruments, a pioneer in group improvisations and the use of electric instruments in jazz.

Sun Ra claimed that he came to Earth from Saturn, and had been called by cosmic beings to “speak through music” to a world that needed him. Bill Sebastian, inventor of the Outerspace Visual Communicator (OVC), was living in the Fort Hill area of Roxbury when he first encountered Sun Ra. The OVC was – and is – a groundbreaking invention; it is a keyboard-triggered “instrument” that, instead of producing traditional sound, harnesses the power of light to interpret sound (whether live or recorded), in real time.

The OVC-3D

The OVC returns to Boston! Bill Sebastian created the original OVC in the 1970s and performed on stage with Sun Ra at theaters in Boston and New York. The videos they made in the 1980s were recently featured in a retrospective at the Roulette Theater in Brooklyn and in Inside the Light World released by Strut Records. The OVC allowed an artist to create visual projections with the same total spontaneous control that a musician has over sound. Sebastian's OVC-3D extends that concept to immersive 3D worlds that can be entered using VR headsets. Bill will be performing live on the OVC-3D at every festival event, accompanying the musicians as they explore a wide range of musical styles. The audience will be able to view the art both through projections of the OVC and VR headsets. Learn more at visualmusicsystems.com.

Host or Publisher Boston Cyberarts