Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I

Forget James Cameron and his $200 million budget: Equipped only with outdated Japanese electronics, Drexciya were the true masters of the deep. From 1992 until 2002, the mysterious electro outfit created not only some of Detroit's most original and enduring electronic music; they created an entire imaginary world, one of the greatest myth systems in the history of techno.

A new compilation of the group's work, the first in a planned four-volume anthology put out by Rotterdam's Clone label, serves as a crucial introduction to Drexciya's worldview as well as, of course, their music. It's a good time for it: In the past two decades, the meaning of "electro" has repeatedly mutated and diluted though its association with electroclash, then Ed Banger's buzzy brand of dance music, and, lately, big-tent commercial rave like Deadmau5 and Wolfgang Gartner. The Drexciya reissue rightly returns the spotlight to the original electro's signature rhythms and analog palette.

From their first release, 1992's Deep Sea Dweller EP, Drexciya were obsessed with sub-aquatic realms. Their first tracks bore titles like "Sea Quake" and "Nautilus 12", and the following year's Bubble Metropolis EP, divided into "Fresh Water" and "Salt Water" sides and with center stickers depicting dolphins cavorting beneath craggy cliffs, poured it on thicker with "Aqua Worm Hole" and "Danger Bay". The music was appropriately liquid, with hi-hats like raindrops, bass like the belch of some fanged denizen of the fathomless dark, and blippy melodies bobbing like bioluminescent lures.

Adapting the lurching rhythmic template of 1980s electro-funk acts like Man Parrish, Cybotron, and Jonzun Crew, Drexciya emphasized the depth-charge qualities of a booming 808 kick, and the electric-eel jolt of a zapping filter sweep. But it went deeper than that. The music was punctuated by cryptic interludes and scraps of code, like an intercepted transmission from "Drexciyan Cruise Control Bubble 1 to Lardossan Cruiser 8 dash 203 X", a head-spinning array of names and numbers relating to something called the "Aquabahn".

Drexciya weren't just trafficking in metaphor and affect; they were telling a story, one worthy of its own blockbuster film. Their "Aquabahn" was, of course, a reference to Kraftwerk, whose robotic method act set an important precedent for Drexciya's own mythmaking. Played out across track titles and cover art, one sheets and liner notes, it went something like this: During the Middle Passage, many pregnant women, sick or dying or simply too much trouble for their captors, were thrown overboard. The fetuses in their wombs, still accustomed to a liquid environment, survived. They thrived, in fact, growing fins and gills, and made their home in the ruins of an underwater city, where they mounted their counter-offensive against human greed and stupidity.

The message fit with the militant stance of Detroit's Underground Resistance label collective, with which Drexciya were affiliated, and so did their anonymity. When James Stinson died, in 2002, I'm willing to bet that most fans didn't even know his name, nor that of his collaborator Gerald Donald. Drexciya were rumored to be related to other shadowy electro projects of the era, like Elecktroids and Dopplereffekt-- a creepy, ostensibly antihumanist project featuring showroom dummies on its record covers and vocoded lyrics like "We have to sterilize the population"-- but in the pre-Discogs era, this was all speculation. To immerse yourself in Drexciya's world was akin to following a particularly far-out comic book, where the misfits wrote the rules and justice always prevailed. It was punk as fuck, frankly-- but from an Afrofuturist perspective.

But for all the talk of combat, Drexciya's was profoundly joyful music: impish, rippling, unpredictable, and never anything less than profoundly funky. This is the first takeaway from Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I. This first volume focuses on the group's first five years, drawing from seven EPs released on labels like Underground Resistance, Submerge, and Warp. (Some tracks have been anthologized before, on 1997's landmark double CD The Quest, but that's long out of print.) Certain tropes predominate: whip-cracking 808 drum patterns, squelchy synthesizer arpeggios, dissonant bleeps and creepy chromatic chord progressions. But there's nothing formulaic about these tracks, which range from the pensive funk of "Aquarazorda" to the double-time frenzy of "Hydro Theory" and "Beyond the Abyss"; it's striking to realize how wildly Drexciya's tempos could vary, especially when compared to the deeply regimented BPMs of today's subgenres of electronic dance music. Indeed, Drexciya made few concessions to DJs: there are no 16-bar intros to facilitate mixing, and at least one point, you can hear a synthesizer pattern skip a beat, probably because one of the musicians leaned on his sequencer at the wrong time.

Lo-fi by today's standards, recorded straight to tape, in real time, with analog machines, Drexciya's sonics are unfailingly urgent and raw; there's more genuine menace in the roiling "Sea Quake" than in practically anything being made today. Clone's Alden Tyrell did a great job with the remastering, preserving the music's wide dynamic range and letting each frequency positively sizzle in space. As hair-raising as the songs can be, it's never an exhausting listen-- unlike too much contemporary electronic music, mastered so uniformly loud that it leaves your ears gasping for air.

It's easy to remember Drexciya primarily for their shtick. Academics love them for their applicability to concepts like Afrofuturism and the Black Atlantic. (Kodwo Eshun was particularly brilliant writing about Drexciya; their slippery maneuvers served as the perfect foil for his own techno-theoretical poetics.) Detroit true-schoolers hold them up as examples of Motor City militancy and analog purism. These are all valid positions, but Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I also reminds us of Drexciya's influence in other contexts, as well. The opening "Welcome to Drexciya" is a beatless burble that wouldn't sound out of place on a record from Emeralds or Oneohtrix Point Never, artists more commonly associated with the "cosmic" traditions of 1970s synthesizer music. Space is a place, sure. But to immerse yourself in Drexciya's underwater world is to be reminded that there are other dimensions just as worthy of exploration.

"Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed?" wrote a figure identified as the Unknown Writer in the liner notes to 1997's The Quest. "Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorize us? Did they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi river basin and on to the great lakes of Michigan? Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us? How and why do they make their strange music? What is their Quest? These are many of the questions that you don’t know and never will. The end of one thing… and the beginning of another. Out."

These questions had a different kind of resonance in the 1990s, before the answer to every question was just a click or two away, before every new "anonymous" artist felt like a walking, talking spoiler alert. To listen to Drexciya today is to wipe the slate clean. We may know James Stinson and Gerald Donald's names now, but their quest feels as cryptic as ever.