Sun Ra was a true innovator, releasing music that was a bit different to his peers from his earliest output. But what would Sun Ra have made of today’s music scene? If he is looking down from his cosmic realm, he’ll be pleased to know that his music from the past still sounds eerily futuristic. Recorded in just one day, on October 10, 1961, The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra features 11 tracks. Among the selections is the Latin-influenced opener, “Bassism,” the bluesy “Of Sounds and Something Else,” and the aptly named, “What’s That?,” which breaks into a four-saxophone improvisation, stands out as an example of Ra’s early experimental work.

A celestial journey is what Sun Ra and His Arkestra created with Space is the Place. Sun Ra’s opus, at its simplest, is a trip through outer-bound melodies, planetary bodies, eras in time, crystals, and space caravans. You will be transported a world away!

Universe in Blue, a collection of undated live club performances by Sun Ra & His Blue Universe Arkestra, was issued in small-run pressings with two different LP covers on Sun Ra's Saturn label in 1972. Until now it has never been officially reissued on LP or CD.

Featuring what may be his only recordings on the Prophet keyboard, these once lost performances expand the omniverse of Ra across a stellar set of lengthy cuts! All recorded in a single day and finally making their terrestrial debut!

Sun Ra, as well as anyone, proved that an artist could change with the times without being a dedicated follower of fashion. In fact, Ra and his music never stopped evolving. A series of albums recorded from 1978 to 1980—Lanquidity, On Jupiter, Sleeping Beauty, and Strange Celestial Road—demonstrate the influence on Ra of musical and production trends of the mid- and late-1970s, especially heavy, studio-enhanced dance floor grooves (traceable from soul and funk to disco), and atmospheric New Age "dream" pieces. But Ra never fully surrendered to these trends; it's arguable that he even embraced them. He adapted techniques, but what he created amounted more to reinventions than "File Under" genre works.

Every Sun Ra album is unique. Yet even by Ra's standards, DISCO 3000 is an outlier. However, it sits comfortably in the Sun Ra discography — because it's weird.

While the most renown track in this omniversal opus is the atomic expletive-filled repartee “Nuclear War,” there is so much more to this dark mysterious journey through the mind of Sun Ra. The sprawling, suite-like 20-minute title track sustains a lyrical edge in spite of an open framework and textures, which encourage sonorities to surface and emerge from the band as if there was no human intention behind them. In opposition to “Nuclear War,” Ra's organ playing here was built less on bombast and sonic terror than it is on whispers, stutters, shivers, and swells. Fireside Chat offers a wide stylistic array, as was the artist’s intent, reflecting his eclectic, seemingly irreconcilable approach to compositional extremes. With Sun Ra you get everything… except predictability.

Celestial Love contains recordings made in September 1982 at New York's Variety Studios, which had hosted countless Sun Ra sessions since the late 1960s. This was one of the last extended sessions at Variety, and these recordings were the last studio works released on Sun Ra's own Saturn label (though the label did continue to press concert recordings, and new studio recordings did appear on other labels). Aside from their inclusion on Celestial Love, tracks from these sessions landed on the albums A Fireside Chat With Lucifer and Nuclear War. Since Nuclear War's contents overlapped with both Fireside Chat and Celestial Love, we have reconstituted the latter two as complete albums, thus covering all titles from these Variety dates.

Recorded live at Storyville jazz club, New York, October 24 & 29, 1977. Quite simply one of Sun Ra's best live albums. This rare recording (originally on Horo records) finds Ra, along with a 19-piece Arkestra, playing a mix of his own compositions ('Images' and 'Lights') along with several jazz standards (including Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp' and Duke Ellington's 'Lightnin''). While Ra's own compositions were usually more avant-garde affairs, he always revelled in playing the classics as well in an effort to give his audience a lesson in jazz history."