![]() However, none of these show the style, grace, and range of vintage Drexciya as ‘The Quest’ does, particularly in its 28-track, two-CD iteration. They also have numerous solo works to their names, with Stinson’s ‘Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café’ album for Warp, as The Other People Place, highly recommended. After reversing their retirement and returning to the fray in 1999, Stinson and Donald would release three excellent albums under the Drexciya name - ‘Neptune’s Lair’ and ‘Harnessed The Storm’ for seminal Berlin techno label Tresor, and ‘Grava 4’ for Clone, the Dutch label that has worked to keep the Drexciya legend alive since the duo split. More importantly, ‘The Quest’ is the strongest Drexciya record. ‘The Quest’ was also, for many techno fans who didn’t have the cash to buy expensive import 12”s, the record that cemented their sonic liaison with the Drexciya duo, a chance to bring their music into our homes. The revelation of this Black Atlantis would have been enough to cement ‘The Quest’ a place in dance music history, as the Drexciya legend finally sharpened into focus. “Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?” “During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo,” the sleeve notes read. These, for the first time, made the Drexciya myth explicit. For Drexciya fans, it was an almost spiritual release to find their music collected, at a reasonable price, in their local record store.Įven more fascinating were the sleeve notes, the work of The Unknown Writer, widely assumed to be Underground Resistance label manager Cornelius Harris. In 1997, Submerge, the Detroit company that distributed many of the city’s key techno releases, issued double-vinyl and CD versions of ‘The Quest’, rounding up a selection of tracks from the group’s EPs and adding a small dusting of new material. ‘The Quest’ marked both the group’s coming out on the larger public stage and their first, temporary retirement. ‘Bubble Metropolis’ kicked off with a voice giving the enigmatic instruction: “This is Drexciyan Cruiser Control Bubble 1 to Lardossian Cruiser 8-203X, please decrease your speed to 1.788.4 kilobahns” ‘Wavejumper’ featured a strained tone proclaiming, “You must face the power of the black wave of Lardossa before you become a Drexciyan Wavejumper” and the ’Deep Sea Dweller’ 12” had “TECHNO FROM THE DEEP” etched onto one side of the vinyl and “DEEP H2O” on the other. There were other hints, too, that there was a lot more to Drexciya than just music. Over the next five years, the duo released a series of 12”s with titles that hinted at underwater legends: ‘Deep Sea Dweller’ was followed by ‘Bubble Metropolis’, ‘Molecular Enhancement’, ‘The Unknown Aquazone’, ‘The Journey Home’, and ‘The Return Of Drexciya’. Stinson and Gerald spent the next three years perfecting their musical ideas before unleashing the debut Drexciya EP, ‘Deep Sea Dweller’, in 1992, its sharp-but-fluid electro-techno style creating a quiet sensation. Inspiration may have come in a wave, but Drexciya was not for rushing. “It felt like a tidal wave rushing across my brain.” “One night I could not sleep, cold sweat, tossing and turning, and around 3am, September 18, 1989, I stood up and said, ‘Drexciya’,” Stinson told John Osselaer of Techno Tourist in 2002. The concept for Drexciya apparently came to Stinson during an unsettled night. ![]() Stinson had been introduced to electronic music in the early 1980s by Cybotron’s astonishing electro classic ‘Alleys Of Your Mind’, with his nascent interest further fed by the influential Detroit radio DJ known as the Electrifying Mojo. Kettering Senior High School, with Stinson, the older of the two, becoming something of a mentor for Donald. ![]() The physical facts behind Drexciya’s existence, as we know them, are not that different from the origin stories of many Detroit techno producers. But somehow this unknowability only draws the listener further in, like the breadcrumb hints in Twin Peaks or the fractured narratives in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Drexciya’s music was never knowingly abstruse, yet there was something profoundly unknowable about the band, who gave few interviews during their decade of existence, ending in 2002 when James Stinson (half of Drexciya, alongside Gerald Donald) died of heart complications at the age of 32.Įven the most knowledgeable of Drexciya scholars - and there are a few - can’t agree on what albums comprise the ‘Storm Series’, a run of LPs released between 20 under a variety of different artist names that might (or might not) lay out the Drexciyan mythos. Detroit duo Drexciya were electronic music’s ultimate world builders and myth makers, a production unit whose exquisite musical control was tied to a profoundly moving, thought-provoking legend, in a conceptually brilliant work of modern art.
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