In The Box: Soda_Jerk, Astro Black

In coordination with this month’s Unorthodocs. festival, The Box features the work of Australian collective Soda_Jerk, which presents its anarchic new film Terror Nullius: A Political Revenge Fable in Three Acts on October 28. Formed by sisters Dan and Dominique Angeloro in Sydney in 2002, the duo is known for sampling and re-mixing found footage to create work that sits squarely at the intersection between documentary film and speculative fiction.

Taking its title from Sun Ra’s 1972 album, Astro Black is an ongoing video series that features the cosmic jazz musician as the central character in an alternate, Afrofuturist history of music and culture emerging from what scholar Paul Gilroy has termed the hybrid, diasporic Black Atlantic space. In the four episodes on view, Soda_Jerk combines footage and sounds from a wide range of material—Star Trek, The Matrix, Kraftwerk, and Public Enemy—to create an alternative historical narrative as compelling as it is entertaining.

What follows are Soda_Jerk’s descriptions of the four episodes of Astro Black playing in The Box. Learn more here.

Astro Black: Race for Space (2010)
“Race for Space gives life to Sun Ra’s claim to have been abducted by aliens who schooled him in the radical potential of music. While working as a piano man in Chicago in 1943, Sun Ra is contacted by Morpheus who offers him a choice of two destinies. Flashing forward to the 1969 moon landing, Neil Armstrong discovers that outer space has already been colonized by Sun Ra and his intergalactic ensemble, The Arkestra. At stake in this episode is the cultural politics implicit in the territorialization of outer space, both as a geography and a virtual field of possibility.” (6:35 mins., video)

Astro Black: We are the Robots (2010)
“We are the Robots re-imagines the iconic scene in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), where sci-entists use a synthesizer keyboard to communicate with an alien mothership. In Soda_Jerk’s revision of these events, Kraftwerk play sequences from their own music and the mothership responds with frag-ments of tracks that have sampled Kraftwerk. This jam session– between the original and sampled ver-sions of Kraftwerk’s music–explores the impact of German electronic music on Afrofuturist sonic culture.” (6:35 mins., video)

Astro Black: Destination Planet Rock (2007)
“Destination Planet Rock maps the intergalactic legacy of Sun Ra and George Clinton in the sci-fi futurism of early hip-hop. Set in 1974 in the South Bronx, the episode be-gins in a neighborhood center where Sun Ra is explain-ing his ideas about the intersection of race, myth and outer space. The three future originators of hip-hop—DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash—are abducted and transported across the galaxy to Planet Rock, where they are schooled in the alien language of turntablism.” (6:05 mins., video)

Astro Black: Armageddon in Effect (2008)
“This episode considers the politics implicit in Public Enemy’s claim that we’re already living [in] armaged-don. It begins with the discovery of an ancient stone crosshairs at an archeological site in Egypt. Sixty years later a giant alien mothership emerges from a mena-cing cloud over New York City, hijacking President Ron-ald Reagan’s TV statement in order to transmit a pirate broadcast from Chuck D, Flavor Flav and Sun Ra. Like Sun Ra’s mantra that ‘it’s after the end of the world’, Public Enemy invoke armageddon to insist upon the critical moment in which we already live.” (6:19 mins., video)