MOONDANCE is a celebration of Afrofuturism within contemporary culture. The journey is in three parts featuring lecture, dance and live music, each of which highlights the depth to which our popular culture is indebted to the ideas of a black alter destiny. King Britt, a key figure within the sonic movement of Afrofuturism, presents a program featuring artists and thinkers who represent the continued influence of an Afrofuturistic aesthetic and mythology within our cultural and academic institutions.
King Brittm, an Afrofuturist artist curated Moondance, but he also is a highly influential album designer, blending magic realism with music.
King Britt compiled this mix for the website OkayAfrica. There, you can still listen to it in all his original and complete Soundcloud flavour. Here you have a Spotify résumé: shorter, nonethless quite exciting for its mixture of old jazzy extravaganza (Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Sun Ra), modern hybrid sounds (Flying Lotus, Common, Madlib) and little glimpses from the nextworld (Shabazz Palaces).
Afrofuturism within music represents a diaspora of music that is non-traditional, focusing around the topic of blackness and space. This specific artpiece is a poster promoting a concert performance of American jazz musician Sun Ra and his band, the Omniverse Arkestra, on 11 October 1980, at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco. The psychedelic design is based on a 1973 portrait photo of Sun Ra.
