No home is complete without at least one Drexciya album, so why not make it three? The brainchild of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, Drexciya is a joint transmission from the bottom of the ocean and the heart of Motor City. Their elaborate discography has surfaced records on Rephlex, Underground Resistance, Warp, Tresor, and more, forging connections between Detroit, London, and Berlin while mythologising the rise of techno in the United States, with a universe-spanning Afrofuturist mythology that has inspired everyone from Aphex Twin, µ-ziq, Rustie, Kode9 and clipping. to a multitude of contemporary artists including The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) and Ellen Gallagher to name just a few.
Subtitled “Scientific Research Development Lab”, the duo’s 1999 debut album Neptune’s Lair crystallised the Drexciyan phenomenon and propelled their Afrofuturist Atlantis mythology worldwide: an aquatic race and civilisation descended from the pregnant slave women thrown overboard during the trans-Atlantic Middle Passage who gave birth under water. The album a largely instrumental affair, evoking the aquatic lore through highly expressive electro and techno rhythms, like the bubbling signals, whalesong synths, and torrents of claps on ‘Andreaen Sand Dunes’, mapping out the wonder of deep-sea exploration. Lauded as one of the most important techno records ever made, it was the spark of an extremely prolific period for Drexciya, and remains in heavy rotation.
The turn of the millennium saw a major evolution in the Drexciyan sound and strategy, as the duo unleashed a maelstrom of albums under different names throughout 2001 and 2002. The first instalment in their revered “storm series”, Harnessed The Storm is stripped back yet bursting with energy, featuring visceral dancefloor manipulations like the lightning flashes, creature cries, and bassy water jets of ‘Digital Tsunami’. Departing from Earth’s oceans to pursue extraterrestrial electro experiments, the series brings us to The Cosmic Memoirs Of The Late Great Rupert J. Rosinthrope, billed by Stinson as one of the final storms before returning to their home universe Grava 4 in Drexciya’s third and final album. The tender pads of ‘Lonely Journey Of The Comet Bopp’ introduce icy piano particles fluttering across tightly woven beats, verging on rhythmic intimacy.
The landscape of electronic dance music would be vastly different without Drexciya, undoubtedly one of the most creative.
