I was watching "The Last Angel of History" this evening, and I spent the first fifteen minutes wondering "When are they gonna talk about Sun Ra? Why aren't they talking about Sun Ra? Who's George Clinton without Sun Ra?"

Then, of course, the film brought him up. Still, though, as far as the space motif in black musics goes, the movie definitely thinks that George Clinton is the ne plus ultra. At one point, Derrick May refers to Sun Ra as "George Clinton's mentor." But then the topic gets dropped, and the film again assumes George Clinton to be the pinnacle of the phenomenon of SF in black musics.

This post is simply to bring up the great work of Sun Ra once again. Space is the Place is probably the most famous album, if only because of the film tie-in (even if you haven't heard the album you may have seen the blaxploitation movie of same name).

But for me, Atlantis is actually his best album, and it's also the one that's most easily legible as the blend of blues, jazz, funk, and electronic music that the movie hints at at the beginning--the whole "black technology" bit with the Robert Johnson myth.

Take the song "Lemuria," for instance. It starts off with a single, off-tune keyboard note, followed by scattered-sounding snare tapping; not quite a count-in rhythm, even, but a sort of primordial presence, wherein you could imagine the seeds of such a rhythm developing. But before that happens, a stuttering electric funk guitar. The guitar proceeds on its own, tentatively, for a few seconds. You know how your computer stutters a little right when you bring it out of hibernation? This guitar sounds as if played by a robot just awakened from such a hibernation. You can't even really tell whether it's funk; it might be that the robot is trying to emulate Robert Johnson after all. Then there's a dot-dot-dash of a keyboard staccato popping up in between guitar notes. Then the snare comes back; then a wincing, farting saxophone appears. And suddenly there's a lurching, lumbering blues robot trying it's damnedest to dance a funk dance. And it sort of works, but the coolest part is how it doesn't quite all hang together, like a Thelonious Monk rhythm but with the the whole body, all the limbs.

That's what I imagine a fully activated black music technology--such as the film posits--sounding like. If you don't know it, check it out. And remember that he was doing this at least ten years before Mothership Connection (and much longer, in fact; Atlantis was, of course, a mid-to-late album, coming as it did in 1967).