Echo Tree w/ NEXCYIA + Shungu + Christine Turner + Robert Mugge + Sun Ra

Echo Tree is a multidisciplinary platform run by ShunGu and Nola, operating at the intersection of art, culture and archives. It offers a space for sharing ShunGu's work, fostering dialogue and exploration at the crossroads of their artistic visions.

Programme at Beursschouwburg on 17 October 2026
17h00 - open
18h00 - film screening Sun Ra: Do the Impossible + aftertalk with ShunGu + surprise guests
20h00 - concert ShunGu + Nexcyia
00h00 - end

Looped screening Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise in the cinema (17h00 - 00h00)

The first edition of Echo Tree explored the legacy of the L.A. Rebellion, a movement of Black filmmakers who developed new cinematic languages outside of dominant modes of representation. Through films, conversation and live performances by Astrønne and damsel Elysium, the evening opened a space to consider cinema and sound not simply as forms of entertainment, but as ways of thinking, remembering and imagining other possibilities.

For its second BSB edition, Echo Tree turns toward the universe of Sun Ra.

Composer, bandleader, poet, philosopher, mystic and a radical figure of twentieth-century music, Sun Ra remains difficult to contain within a single definition. His life and work existed somewhere between music, mythology, spirituality, science fiction, Black history, discipline and collective experimentation. Rather than separating art from life, Sun Ra seemed to approach them as parts of the same continuous practice.

At the centre of the programme are recent perspectives on Sun Ra, including Christine Turner’s documentary Sun Ra: Do the Impossible. This film allows us to approach the complexity of a figure whose ideas could be beautiful, challenging, humorous, demanding and radical, and whose vision continues to resist easy categorisation.

Throughout the evening, A Joyful Noise will also be projected on loop in the small cinema room, creating a parallel space that visitors can enter, leave and return to, an ongoing window into Sun Ra’s music, words, performances and universe.

Beyond his musical language, the evening looks at what Sun Ra’s trajectory can tell us about why and for whom we create.

In 1957, Sun Ra co-founded Saturn Records with Alton Abraham, becoming one of the earliest Black musicians to establish and control his own record label. Through Saturn, he was able to release a large body of work according to his own rhythm and principles, often outside the expectations of the conventional music industry.

This independence was not simply a business decision. It reflected something deeper in his relationship to creation.

Sun Ra did not appear to make music primarily to answer an existing demand, fit within a market, or satisfy the expectations of an industry. Creation could instead become a spiritual practice, a form of research and a means of transformation. He spoke of music as something capable of accessing the unknown and moving human beings toward another state of consciousness. He was even known to compose music privately as an offering of gratitude to the Creator, music that was never intended to be performed or released.

This raises a question that feels increasingly relevant today: what happens when we create not because something has been asked of us, but because we believe something needs to exist for humanity?

Between the screenings, a conversation will explore Sun Ra’s philosophy, the complexity of the person behind the mythology, and his approach to art and life. We will consider artistic independence, spirituality, discipline, collective living and creation, imagination as a form of liberation, and the possibility of making work not simply for an audience or an industry, but in relation to something larger, to community, to humanity, to the unknown.

The evening will then move from reflection into live sound. Nexcyia will perform, followed by ShunGu presenting Faith in the Unknown, accompanied on stage by Ruqqiyah, Mejiwahn and Wonky Logic. The performance extends the dialogue at the heart of Echo Tree, allowing archives and contemporary practices to coexist, and asking how the ideas left by artists before us can be absorbed, questioned and transformed rather than simply celebrated. The night will close with a DJ set, shifting the space once more, from cinema to conversation, from performance to collective listening and movement.

Across its first two editions, Echo Tree is building an archive of encounters between film, sound, history, philosophy and radical imagination. From the filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion to Sun Ra, we are interested in artists who did more than produce work within the conditions given to them, artists who created their own structures, languages and realities when the existing ones were insufficient.