In Made In America, Shirley Clarke’s landmark 1984 documentary film on saxophonist Ornette Coleman, re-released on DVD in 2014, Coleman explains his concept of harmolodics as being based around the idea that “each being’s imagination is their own unison and there are as many unisons as there are stars in the sky.” Even as it echoes the occultist Aleister Crowley’s infamous maxim that “every man and every woman is a star,” it anticipates the celebratory individuality and polymorphous sexual unison of disco. Indeed, Coleman’s music of the early 1970s visions the future raiments of disco in excelsis – its pneumatic rhythms; its erotic glossolalia; its confusion of sex and science – with 1972’s masterpiece, Science Fiction, as the fulcrum, an afro-futurist scrying mirror, or more properly, a disco ball, that would cast black futures from black pasts.

Disco is the sound of the future, now. And – just like science fiction – at its best, disco uncovers the fact of the present. Free jazz saw time, not as tyrannical, but as infinitely pliable, capable of endless nuance and extrapolation. Disco reinvented it as a system of erotics, with the potential for infinite play: a dance.

Coleman’s concept of black future music uses rhythmic time lags, not as a way of generating some kind of cumulative disorientation, like Terry Riley’s tape loops, but as a way of projecting a center of gravity that seems to exist outside of the track itself, somewhere behind or in front, giving the music of Science Fiction a uniquely powerful dynamic that balances aggressive propulsion and an odd, hovering, semi-static feel. This is time as trance, with bassist Charlie Haden and drummers Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins running in mid-air, the ground giving way beneath them like cartoon roadrunners.