otherworld

Halfway through this almost 10-minute song, brighter horns, more abrasive percussion and feverish strings enter and lead Sun Ra Arkestra listeners to where they are used to being: a vivid and immersive otherworld.

On a recent sunny afternoon, customers filtered off the street into an otherworld of incense and acoustic chillhop.

The Upside Down is an otherworld, a parallel universe.

“With sloping eyes and long fingers expressive of exceptional reach, they speak as messengers from an Afrofuturist-inflected otherworld,” Nancy Princenthal wrote in the Times.

This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of being.