Kronos Quartet teams with Jlin, Moor Mother

This is really a story about a tribute album getting flattened into a simpler pitch. “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” is not just Kronos Quartet linking up with Jlin and Moor Mother for a single cross-genre experiment. It’s a full 2024 album — *Outer Spaceways Incorporated: Kronos Quartet & Friends Meet Sun Ra* — built as a large collaborative Sun Ra project with a long guest list and a pretty specific mission. Kronos is the anchor. Jlin and Moor Mother are important pieces. But the frame is bigger than that. ### So what is this album, exactly? It’s a Kronos Quartet-led tribute to Sun Ra, released in 2024 with Red Hot as part of a broader series inspired by Sun Ra’s music and worldview. Kronos also treated it as a capstone to the group’s 50th anniversary, which matters because this is less “guest feature culture” and more a legacy ensemble asking what its next language should sound like. (redhot.org) ### Why Sun Ra? Because Sun Ra is one of the rare figures who can hold all these sounds together without the whole thing feeling forced. He came out of jazz, but his work already carried electronics, cosmic philosophy, big-band swing, free improvisation, poetry, and total formal freedom. If you want a project where string quartet writing can sit next to footwork production and abrasi(redhot.org)(kronosquartet.org) ### Where do Jlin and Moor Mother fit? Jlin appears as one of the album’s featured collaborators and has a direct hand in “Maji,” where she’s credited for writing and production while Kronos handles the arrangement and performance. Moor Mother is involved through the wider guest roster, and the album announcement specifi(kronosquartet.org)eal parts of the record. But they are not the whole record. (redhot.bandcamp.com) ### Why does that distinction matter? Because calling it a Kronos-Jlin-Moor Mother collaboration makes the album sound like a neat three-way blend. Turns out the actual design is messier and more interesting. Laurie Anderson is there. Armand Hammer is there. Marshall Allen from Sun Ra Arkestra is there. RP Boo, Laraaji, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Terry Riley, and others are there too. The album works more like a constellation than a band session. (stereogum.com) ### What does Kronos bring to something like this? Kronos has spent decades doing the “string quartet, but open-source” thing — treating the format less like a museum object and more like a flexible interface. That makes the group unusually good at crossing into electronic music, jazz, minimalism, and pol(stereogum.com)sue — the thing that lets wildly different collaborators share a grammar. (kronosquartet.org) ### And what does Jlin bring? Rhythm architecture. Jlin’s music is famously percussive and sharply engineered, and on a track like “Maji” that matters because Kronos is not just decorating a beat. The quartet is being arranged inside a rhythmic system that has its own force and logic. That’s the interesting inversion here — the “classical” group is not automatically the center of gravity. (redhot.bandcamp.com) ### Is this being treated as a notable release? Yes, but mostly in specialist music circles and experimental-music coverage rather than as a mainstream pop event. The coverage around the announcement and release leaned hard on the guest list, the Sun Ra angle, and the sheer improbability of the combinations. That’s usually a sign(redhot.bandcamp.com)ight now. (stereogum.com) ### Bottom line The cleanest way to understand “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” is this: Kronos used Sun Ra as a meeting point. Jlin and Moor Mother help define the album’s edge, but the bigger achievement is the structure — a veteran quartet building a many-artist experimental record that treats genre borders as optional. (redhot.org)