Some projects have long roots. When There’s No Sun — the Sun Ra Arkestra remix album on Omni Sound — traces its origins back to Istanbul in 1990, when Sun Ra and his Arkestra performed from the back of a flatbed truck moving down Istiklal Avenue on the day the street was permanently pedestrianised. The event was organised by Ahmet Ulug, his brother Mehmet, and their colleague Cem — a moment that Ahmet describes as “the beginning of our careers in culture and entertainment,” and one that eventually grew into Pozitif, Babylon, and Doublemoon Records, three institutions that defined Istanbul’s cultural life for a generation.
Thirty years later, Ahmet founded Omni Sound, and the thread connecting back to that afternoon on Istiklal Avenue remained intact. Working with the Sun Ra Arkestra under Marshall Allen’s direction, the label released Living Sky — a double album recorded just after COVID. “We wrote to Marshall Allen asking for an instrumental, downtempo album,” Ahmet recalls. “He read the letter and delivered Living Sky, a record with no words but incredibly moving music.” A poetry album followed. The groundwork for a remix project had been quietly laid.
Co-producer and scene architect Ayse Turan Sorel came to the project through a different, but equally formative path. Her introduction to underground electronic music came through Minas Balcioglu a.k.a mini bashekim who ran the legendary Istanbul club (((godet))), just off Istiklal Avenue. The club, managed by the S.O.A.P crew and its residents which included mainly ((emre)) and Barış K amongst others, played a defining role in shaping Istanbul’s electronic music’s subcultures.
Ayse’s later work at Radio Nova in Paris — where Laurent Garnier, Ivan Smagghe, and Max Guiguet were among the previous programmers — deepened her understanding of independent music and its cultural politics. She remembers finding most treasured Garnier interviews of Mike Banks and Moodymann dat tapes in the Nova Archives. Back in Istanbul, she worked as a booker with Minas and the S.O.A.P crew, as well as Undomondo and Etrafta, helping shape a dynamic programme of events and collaborations.
A particular moment at Fabric London in 2011 proved to be a turning point. During one of Ricardo Villalobos’ residency sets, he played a piece of Alevi/Sufi psychedelic music and asked Ayse if she could identify it. She couldn’t. It turned out to be by her friend and colleague Barış K and his band Insanlar. “Ricardo encouraged me to explore my own cultural roots more deeply, rather than focusing exclusively on US and European electronic music,” she says. That conversation led directly to the Kime Ne – Insanlar project with Honest Jon’s Records, and years later, to this one.
When Ahmet proposed the Sun Ra remix project and invited Ayse to collaborate, Ricardo came on board and the scope began to expand. “We found ourselves in an ongoing exchange of ideas — especially around who else to invite given the budget that we had,” Ayse explains. “It grew into a global recording project that reflects multiple facets of electronic music, spanning different genres and scenes.”
The curatorial approach was deliberate. Honouring the foundational legacies of Chicago house and Detroit techno was a priority from the start — and Chicago carried particular resonance, given that Sun Ra himself had spent formative years there, working long shifts in the speakeasies of Calumet City. Ricardo invited Chez Damier to represent that lineage, an addition Ayse describes as transformative. like this – “We always wanted UR and after months of back and forth and sleepless nights waiting to hear from that Detroit phone call, how honoured we were when UR finally said yes,” says Ayse. Their decision to work with Saul Williams tracks was fitting — Williams had an existing relationship with Ahmet through previous collaborations, and his involvement had helped open the door.
Drum and bass and jungle were equally important to represent. A Guy Called Gerald was a natural and significant inclusion, his choice to reinterpret Message to Black Youth feat. Mahogani L. Browne landing with real purpose. Calibre — an artist whose work has always sat beyond the boundaries of any single genre — delivered remixes that Ayse says genuinely surpassed expectations. “When Dom delivered his remixes, Ricardo and I were genuinely blown away.” She had first been introduced to his music by Mark Ernestus and Chris Parkinson at a D&B night at Open Ground in Wuppertal.
Balance across the lineup was something Ricardo pushed for throughout the process. “At one point he said to me, ‘Ayse, we can’t have only big names — we need to include artists from the younger generation who will carry forward,'” she recalls. He introduced She Spells Doom — Zambian artist Wamya — whose reaction to the invitation was one of the project’s more memorable moments. “When I first contacted Wamya, he could hardly believe the invitation was genuine and initially thought it was a prank call.”
The inclusion of Barış K and MiniBashekim closes the loop in the most fitting way — a direct line back to Godet, to the Honest Jon’s collaboration, and to the community that had shaped both Ayse and the project’s DNA. “Having Barış K contribute such an intricate remix honouring Abiodun Oyewole’s voice and Ra’s poetry felt like a meaningful full-circle moment for us,” she says.
Mastering was handled by Dubplates and Mastering in Berlin — a deliberate choice, given the longstanding trust that Ricardo and many of the contributing artists had placed in the studio. Engineer Kassian described the task plainly: “It felt like a privilege to work on this compilation. Since the individual pieces came from such a broad range of artists, I had to use quite different approaches to some of these in order to bring it all together in one sonic space.”
As for Sun Ra himself — Ayse is measured in how she approaches the question. “I understand Sun Ra as one of the most prolific, visionary, and unconventional figures in the history of modern jazz — a tireless composer and bandleader, and a true innovator who was pushing sonic boundaries through early use of Moog synthesizers and exploring the intersection of electronic music and jazz long before it became recognised.” The hope, simply, is that the album reflects something of that same willingness to explore. “Above all, we approach this work with deepest reverence and gratitude, in the hope that we have, in some small way, honoured both Ra and the legacy of his Arkestra.”
You can buy “Where There Is No Sun” LP on Digital and Vinyl via Omni Sound’s Bandcamp.
