Equal parts science fiction, Blaxploitation, and musical performance with a dose of surrealism, Space is the Place stars Ra on a mission to recruit young Black Americans for a space colony, using music as the vessel. He plays a card game with a pimp called the Overseer in order to determine the fate of the human race, and he opens an Outer Space Employment Agency at a youth center in Oakland, eventually transporting numerous people on his spaceship.
Directed by Sun Ra, filmed in Oakland and Berkeley, and starring the jazz legend himself, Space is the Place is a foundational work of Afrofuturism. And like Sun Ra himself, it is a constellation of things. It is a film made in 1972 and released in 1974 telling the fantastical story described above. It is also the name of a 1973 free jazz album by Sun Ra with music entirely different from the film soundtrack. But the soundtrack also exists, and it finally got released in 1993. Now, three decades later, that soundtrack has been reissued as a box set by Sundazed featuring 45 minutes of bonus material on three colored vinyl along with the film on Blu-ray and DVD.
Like the film itself, the soundtrack is a deeply philosophical, cultural, cosmic exploration of Blackness in America and the universe, connecting the past, present, and future through music that is all at once experimental, spiritual, and, of course, jazzy. This is foreground music meant to challenge not just the senses but entire frames of reference and perception, at times dizzying, at times grounding, a procession from the crumbling apocaplyse to infinitely imaginable possible existences. The world is yours.
