Laraaji & Sun Araw: The Play Zone – UK tour June 2014 (EU dates to follow)

Thurs 5th June
St John Sessions, St John At Hackney Church w/ Chris Madak, 7.30pm, £15 adv
Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/260802#.UxW6sZR5yBM

Fri 6th June
Kraak Gallery, Manchester, 7pm, £10 adv
Tickets: http://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Manchester/Kraak-Gallery/Sun-Araw-and-Laraaji-The-Play-Zone/12131078/

Sat 7th June
The Kazimier, Liverpool + Sun Araw DJ set, 7pm, £10 adv
Tickets: http://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Liverpool/Kazimier/Sun-Araw-and-Laraaji-The-Play-Zone/12131058/

Sun 8th June
Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol w/ Oneohtrix Point Never, 7.30pm, £15 adv
Tickets: https://www.musicglue.com/qu-junktions/events/8-jun-14-oneohtrix-point-never–laraaji–sun-araw–the-play-zone–oscilanz–arnolfini/

‘Laugh With Laraaji’ – laughter meditation workshops

Weds 4th June
‘Laugh With Laraaji’ workshop, Cafe OTO Project Space, London 6pm, £10 adv
Tickets: https://www.musicglue.com/qu-junktions/events/4-jun-14-laugh-with-laraaji—laughter-meditation-workshop-oto-project-space/

Sat 7th June
‘Laugh With Laraaji’ workshop, Kraak Gallery, Manchester, midday, £5 adv
Tickets: http://www.skiddle.com/whats-on/Manchester/Kraak-Gallery/Laugh-with-Laraaji-meditation-workshop/12131080/

Sun 8th June
‘Laugh With Laraaji’ workshop, Arnolfini Light Studio, 3pm, £6 adv
Tickets: https://www.musicglue.com/qu-junktions/events/8-jun-14-laugh-with-laraaji—laughter-meditation-workshop-arnolfini/

Hitting the UK for an early summer run, ‘The Play Zone’ is a special show featuring two remarkable pan-generational American artists, each of whom has carved their own sweet 21st century spiritual sphere in musical space and time. Laraaji & Sun Araw both drink deep at the well of mysticism in very different ways to produce their own special strain of free-souled psychedelia. A steady and glorious aural pursuit of the eternal, both drawing on ancient and modern strains of sound therapies, is what unites these two serious & mischievous mavericks, and their sharing of the performance space will refract their daring cosmic musics to new dimensions. Dates below.

New York-based meditator, laugh-master and celestial musician Laraaji celebrates the release of a comprehensive celebration of his audio works on All Saints Records/WARP by interconnecting with LA composer/multi-instrumentalist/visual artist Cameron Stallones aka Sun Araw, whose stunning new album ‘Belomancie’ (out now on Sun Ark/Drag City) floods his already rich sonic palette in new light, colour and fidelity. Zither, electronics, acoustics and outernational sound sources will ravish the senses.

Further to this, at three of the four dates there is the unmissable chance to ‘Laugh With Laraaji’ at one of the legendary laugh-master’s laughter meditation workshops: an empowering, uplifting and holistic educational experience, with the aim to open up the participants spontaneous, playful nature via call-and-response chanting, theraputic laughter-cise, extended conscious laughter, deep meditative relaxation and ancient gong tones.. as the man himself says: ‘Dress comfortably, and expect to have some serious fun’.

MORE ARTIST INFO & LINKS

LARAAJI

Eternity Or Bust: A short film about Laraaji: http://vimeo.com/75415290

Laraaji is a musician, mystic and laughter meditation practitioner based in New York City. He began playing music on the streets in the 1970s, improvising trance-inducing jams on a modified autoharp processed through various electronic effects. Brian Eno saw him playing one night in Washington Square Park and invited him to record an album for his seminal Ambient series (Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance, released 1980). Laraaji went onto release a prolific series of albums for a wide variety of labels, many of which he recorded himself at home and sold as cassettes during his street performances. In recent years he has been collaborating with a new generation of underground musicians, most notably on the 2011 album he recorded for the acclaimed FRKWYS series with Blues Control (That Healing Feeling). Most recently he has had his career celebrated with the double disc retrospective Celestial Music 1970 – 2011 (one of the 2013 reissues of the year in both The Wire and FACT), had his classic Essence/Universe and Flow Goes The Universe albums reissued, appeared on the acclaimed Light In The Attic compilation of private issue new age music I Am The Center, and played live at the Deerhunter-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties festival. 2014 will see the release of a vinyl edition of Celestial Music and some specially commissioned remixes by new acolytes Sun Araw, Bee Mask, Ela Orleans and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel.

Listen to ‘I Am Ocean’ (1981): https://soundcloud.com/all-saints-records/laraaji-i-am-ocean-1981

Watch a mini-laughter workshop at ATP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzktEXmKYCY

SUN ARAW

Over a steady flurry of full-length albums, cassette releases, EPs and some arresting visual work, LA’s Cameron Stallones aka Sun Araw has evolved as a singular purveyor of pan-dimensional, transcedentalist modern music. New album ‘Belomancie’, out on his own Sun Ark label in February, is a sublime palette-cleanser of a record: self-described as an ‘active listening experience…not designed to accompany existing environments’, it reveals unheralded clarity and depths of emotion in his work. Having played the material solo on a short European tour last summer, this tour finds Stallones linking once again with regular live collaborator Alex Gray.

‘Belomancie’ is the first Sun Araw album since the pointillist stumble-funk and heat-bent grooves of 2012’s ‘The Inner Treaty’, which dropped shortly after ‘ICON GIVE THANK’, an incredible collaborative album between Cameron, M. Geddes Gengras and roots reggae vocal legends The Congos via the RVNG label as part of their FRKWYS series.
The legacy of the project via Duppy Gun Productions, the outer orbit dancehall label founded by Stallones and Gengras, now being distributed by Stones Throw.

And so Cameron continues his prolific and idiosyncratic artistic ventures: producing visually arresting videos for some of his totemic tracks, producing and emitting countless DJ mixes, rerubs, unofficial edits and spontaneous jams.

Listen to new track ‘Huff': https://soundcloud.com/sun-araw/huff-from-belomancie-2014

Listen to Sun Araw live in Rome, April 2013:

https://sunaraw.bandcamp.com/album/live-roma