Electric Fling is a column that explores the world of dance music. 

A1 "The Overseer"

Sun Ra sits between Horus and Anubis, their golden headpieces gleaming in the back of the hooptie ride as they cruise downtown Oakland. It’s 1972 and the interplanetary messenger Ra takes in the terrestrial scene. "The people have no music that is in coordination with their spirits. Because of this, they're out of tune with the universe," he utters. "Since they don’t have money, they don’t have anything. If the planet takes hold of an alter destiny, there’s hope for all of us. But otherwise the death sentence upon this planet still stands. Everyone must die."

It’s a scene from Sun Ra’s 1974 blaxploitation sci-fi film, Space Is the Place. And like a comet or some other incandescent heavenly body moving on its own elliptical trajectory, it intermittently returns to view. Out of print since a 2004 DVD (which itself updated a 1993 VHS), this shoestring-budget astral projection recently resurfaced via Harte Recordings’ deluxe DVD/CD/book edition. Last month, the film was the centerpiece in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Afrofuturism on Film series (along with Blade, The Brother From Another Planet and a film featuring George Clinton’s floating head).

In his 1994 essay, "Black to the Future", cultural critic Mark Dery first proposed the concept of Afrofuturism, a way of regarding the African Diaspora through the lens of technoculture and science fiction, envisioning a slightly less dystopic and disenfranchised future for people of color. But its roots predate the tag, and can be found in the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, in 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer's dub fan Maelcum, in the music of Clinton's Mothership-steering Parliament/Funkadelic, in the perfect beats of Afrika Bambaataa and in the hieroglyphics of Rammellzee. These works all look to outer space to explain terrestrial existence.

Looming over all these Afrofuturistic visionaries is Sun Ra, the Alabama-born pianist who embraced prototype synthesizers and the ancient iconography of Egypt, who announced "I am an alien" a good half-century before Lil Wayne. As Kodwo Eshun put it in his crucial book More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction: "To listen to Ra is to be dragged into another sonar system, an omniverse of overlapping sonar systems which abduct you from Trad audio reality. By becoming alien himself, Ra turns you alien." While marginalized within the jazz world, Ra's influence transmitted beyond the limits of spacetime. Eshun continues: "After the Arkestra come the audiovehicles of the 70s: The Upsetters’ Black Ark, Creation Rebel’s Starship Africa, Parliament’s Mothership… on the sleeve of Herbie Hancock’s '74 Thrust. The Futurist builds conceptual soundcrafts, new arks for exploring unheard soundworlds. Whoever controls the synthesizer controls the sound of the future, by evoking the alien."

So while these newly-released editions of Space Is the Place offer introductions from the likes of the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Sun Ra’s synthesizer control transcends indie rock guitar players. Indeed, Sun Ra’s spirit vibrates strongest in the electronic music underground. You can hear him in Detroiters like Rick Wilhite and Mike Huckaby (who did a series of Sun Ra edits), in the funky, ankh-y instrumentals of L.A.’s Ras G and Antipop Consortium member High Priest’s HPrizm project. Last year, King Britt paid tribute to the man with the Fhloston Paradigm Live Transmission Mix, which he called "a displaced re-interpretation of Ra’s Space Is the Place." Thoth from Space Is the Place adorns the cover of Black Zone Myth Chant’s spaced-out new album Mane Thecel Phares. And next month, the two-disc Soul Jazz Records set Sounds of the Universe: Art + Sound 2012-15 will feature some of the heaviest Afrofuturistic producers out there: Hieroglyphic Being, Ras G, Aybee, DJ Stingray and more. Ra’s prophetic sound of the alter-destiny is among us.

A2 "The Seer of Cosmic Visions"

"Sun Ra taught me that there are no boundaries and no limitations. His music wasn’t about making sense: it was just about receiving these transmissions, this knowledge. It was a shock to the system at first."

Jamal Moss is chatting with me on Skype from his hotel room in L.A. Moss makes music primarily as Hieroglyphic Being. That Ra's music and myth courses through his brusque and beauteous productions is evident not just in his name, but in Moss' copious output. Since 2004, there's been a slew of releases (I count 33 albums on Discogs), some on hand stamped 12"s, others as CD-Rs, almost all of them in quickly vanishing editions. They veer from drilling, drum heavy techno to acid rendered by a malfunctioning satellite burning up in the atmosphere. Many tracks name-check Sun Ra overtly, as on albums like The Sun Man Speaks and Strange Strings.

Last year, Planet Mu released The Seer of Cosmic Visions, a crucial compilation culled from Moss' massive back catalog and credited to Hieroglyphic Being and the Configurative or Modular Me Trio. For neophytes, it’s an excellent portal into Hieroglyphic Being’s soundworld: there’s the gurgling acid lines of "The Human Experience", the flickering white noise of "How Wet Is Ur Box", the distorted thump of "Letters From the Edge", and the astral techno of "Space Is the Place". 

"I wasn’t going with the grain or against the grain, I was just doing my own thing," he said of his creative process, putting out the music himself instead of waiting for an outsider to deem it worthy of release. "I was doing it for my own self-fulfillment. It was more therapeutic. I'm not waiting for somebody else to make something happen; you gotta make it happen for yourself."

Hieroglyphic Being and the Configurative or Modular Me Trio: "Space Is the Place" (via SoundCloud)

At a young age, Moss was adopted by relatives who put him onto older jazz and earlier musical forms. "The people I grew up with were deep into esoteric ways of thinking, they was into new thought," Moss said. "They was into higher abstract ways of processing certain things in the world around them through books and literature, through music, through art, through religion, and that affected me a certain way." So while it’s easy to listen to Hieroglyphic Being and hear the parallels to Sun Ra’s sound, he says that the connection goes much deeper for him: "Sun Ra speaks about experiences either transcendental or metaphysical or cosmic and there are pieces that I can take from it and then translate it when I'm ready to create my own way of explaining the universe around me."

B1 "East Oakland Space Program"

When the tech bubble burst at the end of the 20th century, Bay Area web designer Armon Bazile was almost relieved. "When the Web 1.0 space collapsed, I was really burnt out and on the verge of a nervous breakdown," he said. "Music was something that was healing for me. I did not quite know where it would take me, but it gave me a chance to heal and recreate myself."

Via early message boards, Bazile connected with Chicago deep house legend Ron Trent and soon saw his first single (twisting his initials into the moniker Aybee) released on Trent’s Prescription Records imprint. It was followed later by an EP put out by another underground house hero, Jus-Ed. And in 2001, Bazile began his own label, Deepblak.

"The Punk/DIY ethos that lives within us all is the greatest creative spark we have," he said of starting his own label and having complete control over the music. "The artist must have some freedom, and be connected to the music from conception to implementation. DIY is very important for me, though there are days where I feel like the ‘underground’ is merely a waiting room for people who just have not had the opportunities to sell their soul yet."

It was on another message board, one dedicated to early jungle/drum’n’bass legends 4 Hero, that Bazile connected with Eric Douglas Porter—an electronic producer who had just relocated to Oakland from Atlanta and went by the name of Afrikan Sciences. "When I heard his music, I was never the same," Bazile said. "I felt like a man stranded on a planet, and then all of a sudden you find someone else there. It just affirmed so much I felt inside." Via Deepblak, Bazile released a slew of music, sometimes deep house, sometimes broken beat-inspired, other times—as on his collab with Afrikan Sciences on last year’s Sketches of Space—closer to "future jazz."

AYBEE and Afrikan Sciences: "K-Fetisch 01 (Kosmo Bahn)" (via SoundCloud)

After over a decade of operating the label out of Oakland, Bazile decided to relocate to Berlin. He finds Berlin and Europe more receptive to his sounds and full of new challenges, "a larger creative canvas." He recently made his own silent film and soundtrack, The Gift, with cinematography by photographer Marie Staggat, which had its world premiere earlier this week in Washington D.C. as part of Forward Fest. Working with visuals has a political component for Bazile. "With a smartphone in your hand you become media, you can shoot HD film, create the soundtrack, and broadcast it worldwide," he said. "We are very empowered."

B2 "The Image Sound"

A pork pie hat atop his head, Eric Porter is digging at the record shop A1 in Manhattan’s East Village, pulling out an old Loose Ends 12'' and a few other selections. Just outside the door is one of winter’s last blizzards, but Porter seems unfazed by the weather. New York City is Porter’s home, but he grew up in the Deep South and spent over a decade in the Bay Area before returning to the Bronx two winters ago.

As we make our way through the snow towards a ramen spot in Alphabet City, Porter talks about his musical upbringing, growing up on jazz like Les McCann and Cannonball Adderley before falling hard for hip-hop: Marley Marl, Public Enemy, Ultramagnetic MC's. DJing hip-hop was his first endeavor, but as the '90s went along and the form narrowed into "formulaic subject matter," as he put it, he broadened his horizons.

"I started hearing all of these different movements in music that coexisted and were touching on some of the same elements," he said. "It all started to make sense." He points to the sounds coming out of West London in the late '90s, as well as the sounds of "Doctor Who" he had grown up with. "My love for science fiction and electronics went with envisioning myself as this mad scientist," he continued, "trying to translate all of these influences and also pinpoint it directly back to the source, the motherland, the first instrument: the drum."

The drums as programmed on Afrikan Sciences’ deft album Circuitous (released at the end of last year on the experimental PAN imprint) refuse to ever settle into a steady pattern. If anything, they are as slippery as the sidewalks outside, Porter’s programming constantly shifting, tumbling, finding new patterns. Sometimes they move towards the swing of jazz ("Evolved in Twists"), other times they hearken back to broken beat ("Group Home Reality") and on the title track, they are crisp and tight.

Afrikan Sciences: "The Image" (via SoundCloud)

The steadiest beat comes on "The Image" as swirling organ, thumb piano and cosmic synths weave about. At its peak, a voice enters with a mantra: "Music is the image/ Is the music/ Is the image/ The sound image/ The image sound." It’s a recording of saxophonist Marshall Allen, the bandleader of Sun Ra’s Arkestra since Ra left the terrestrial plane in 1993, reciting one of Sun Ra’s poems. "With music you have the ability to cover so many different subject matters, but usually it tends to stay in the realm of love songs or party music," Porter said. "But you can go much deeper with this music: you can get spiritual, you can expand and get transcendental."