On June 12, 1971, Sun Ra, jazz piano prodigy from Birmingham, Ala., by way of Saturn — a planet he insists he visited during an alien abduction when he was a child — put a curse on Los Angeles. He was performing with his band, the Sun Ra Arkestra, at J.P. Widney Jr. High School when someone had the misfortune of cutting the lights. The band had just finished a rendition of “Walking on the Moon,” a song that admonishes, “If you wake up now, it won’t be too soon,” implying that it’s both too late and inevitable — the grand stupor of the human experience has been punctured by the brutal clarity of the space age. It’s rumored that it was the school custodian who stole the light because he wanted to go home and considered proctoring the concert a chore and not a privilege. The hour-and-25-minute recording of the event was generated by a tape recorder placed center stage, and in the years since, it’s warped its way into a portentous aura. Distortions, squeals, fuzz and machine hum lurk within the music so that when the conflict arises it seems to have been brewing throughout the show. When darkness descends on the auditorium, the instruments are still plugged in and the tape is still documenting. Some of Ra’s tirade is redacted by organ and amplifier reverb, and howling and stomping from the audience, which all begins to sound like an avant-garde high school cheerleader squad. Emergent from the cacophony is Ra’s peeved voice promising, “This planet needs me, I don’t need it, lights turned out on me ’cause lights turned out on the whole planet..." What would it require to lift the curse and extend Ra his deserved hospitality in Los Angeles, 51 years later? With this in mind, artist Harmony Holiday brought in her friends Nikita Gale (@nikitagale) and Arthur Jafa (@anamibia) to create “Sun Ra in the Dark” — a conversation between Sun Ra and the light. Watch the video and click the link in the bio to see frayed, blurry transcription of what transpired.