- Last Friday in Brooklyn, Detroit DJ and producer Mike Huckaby delivered a two-hour set of his own Sun Ra edits on reel-to-reel tapes. The venue, a gritty loft space, was tricked out with installations and references to Sun Ra's films and discography. Climbing the stairs, partygoers were greeted by a mural dotted with Egyptian iconography and Black Panther Party logos, a hanging DJ booth mounted with laser-beam eyeballs made from papier-mâché and a door painted with the words "Outer Space Employment Agency"—a reference to the Sun Ra song of the same name.
Huckaby credits the lauded jazz experimentalist—known as the godfather of the loose ideology known as Afrofuturism—as a major influence on his own material, and has released two volumes of Sun Ra edits on the Dutch label Kindred Spirits. "Jazz is the umbrella that deep house resides under," he once told the German magazine Banq, and his globe-trotting Reel-To-Reel party makes those connections audible, drawing out the ties between many decades of radical black music. With a lineup that also included the more abstract stylings of Sequencias label boss JM de Frias, it traced a "space music" lineage from jazz and poetry through to contemporary house, techno and avant-garde music.
Huckaby's set kicked off around 1 AM with a string of chaotic audio collages that pulled together jazz drums, meandering flourishes of flute and clarinet, muffled chants and clips from various poetry takes and interviews. Rather than going the more obvious route and offering tamed dance floor remixes of more free-form Sun Ra excursions, Huckaby's edits emphasized the fitful rhythms and unruly textures of the original material. It elicited a healthy mix of confusion, intrigue and rapture from the packed audience.
More coherent rhythms emerged as the set neared its one-hour mark, with certain sections approaching the regularity of a percussion-heavy house groove—though they never tipped into fully quantized territory. The grooves that did rise out of the mix had the feeling of repeated live drum phrases. This, combined with the warm, swollen quality of reel-to-reel tape and the rough textures of the sample material, encouraged a gentle trance state that was markedly different from the mood that hangs over most dance floors. Huckaby transitioned out of his tape set with a series of joyous vinyl selections that included Stevie Wonder's "You Got It Bad Girl." Analog Soul, the twin sister duo of Jacquelyn and Kathryn Smith, took the controls next, steering a sharp left turn towards late-night techno and carrying Huckaby's cosmic thread into tougher territory.
House and techno parties in New York City don't usually vary in terms of format. They may be tiny loft affairs or large sponsored events; they may emphasize hardware sets over DJs; perhaps they skew towards crunchy, vintage records over the more polished contemporary fare. But in general, conceptual events—those that tell a story—are rare in these circles. This party blew fresh air into the Brooklyn underground by offering something more artful than your average night of rhythm and bass.