M. Lamar & The Living Earth Show: MACHINES AND OTHER INTERGALACTIC TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SPIRIT at EMPAC

Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit is a work-in-progress music performance by composer and vocalist M. Lamar with the experimental music duo The Living Earth Show in the EMPAC Concert Hall. Drawing from the Black Futurist philosophy of revolutionary musician and thinker Sun Ra, M. Lamar’s work imagines the birth of new technologies that address the various failings of contemporary society. Here and in his large-scale work, Lamar’s tools are primarily sonic—drawing from psychedelic rock, noise music, opera, and doom metal. His musical, theatrical, and visual approaches exist in an environment of improvisational possibility. Visually, the piece aims to evoke fantasy and memory of ancient Egypt, pre-Atlantic Christianity, and outer space as visualized in 1970s mass media and in the 2020s photography of the James Webb telescope. In sound and image, Machines contrasts, magnifies, merges, and transmutes some of the most distinctive elements of M. Lamar’s and Sun Ra’s bodies of work.