Lustrous pearls adorning the décolletage, fur stole flung effortlessly over the shoulder, puppy in hand- itself bejeweled- a model struts her stuff down a runway. Against all odds, this scene finds its origins far from a Paris Fashion Week catwalk. Rather, we find the fashion capital in flames in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary, Paris is Burning, as this lavishly dressed figure is revealed to be a drag queen executing her closest mimicry of that haute couture model in a Harlem ballroom.

On the 18-minute track Myth Versus Reality (The Myth-Science Approach), composer Sun Ra takes us on a kaleidoscopic musical voyage, commencing with a manifesto-like chant: “If you are not a reality, whose myth are you? If you are not a myth, whose reality are you?”. Sun Ra’s answer to this question is delivered sonically: as the recitation of the antimetabole subsides into the background, a cacophonic crash of jazz instruments and patternless noise takes over. As Sun Ra intended, its stylistic discordance echoes a greater narrative of the post-slave Black diasporic condition- a field of study centred on questions of hybridity, oppositionality, and the conflict of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’.