Brendan M. Gillen remembers Drexciya: a tribute

Brendan M. Gillen remembers Drexciya: a tribute

6 January, 2012 | 2.07PM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: brendan m. gillen, clone, drexciya, ectomorph

The year’s first medal for outstanding service to the past, present and future of electronic music surely goes to the Netherlands’ Clone Classic Cuts, which has just released one of 2012’s most important reissues: Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I, the first part of a four-volume compendium of the work of iconic Detroit electro outfit Drexciya.

The duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, Drexciya were active from 1992 until Stinson’s death in 2002; in that decade, they made some of the most innovative electro and techno ever to come out of the Motor City—or anywhere else, for that matter. Few people knew their names at the time, however: like Underground Resistance (with whom they worked) or Basic Channel, Drexciya shrouded their identities in mystery; they only clouded the waters with further aliases and side projects like L.A.M., Elecktroids, Dopplereffekt, Japanese Telecom, Transllusion, and The Other People Place.

What was more radical even than their secrecy was the mythology they created, inventing an underwater world populated by the mutant spawn of pregnant mothers who had perished during the Middle Passage. Drexciya’s urgent, angry, humorous and downright perverse music didn’t just talk about this mythical land; it seemed to come directly from the deep—fins, gills and all. Beyond its musical immediacy, Drexciya’s Afrofuturist bubble funk was like a comic book come to life.

In the interest of spreading the Drexciyan legacy, we asked Detroit’s Brendan M. Gillen to share his thoughts on the group. Gillen worked alongside Drexciya’s Gerald Donald in Flexitone and Ectomorph, and Gillen’s label Interdimensional Transmissions, founded in 1995, was deeply influenced by Drexciya’s sound and ethos.

Read on as Gillen offers fascinating insight on the group’s history, and check back next week for Drexciya tributes from Marcel Dettmann, Mark Pritchard, Peter van Hoesen, and more.

BRENDAN GILLEN: I first fell in love with Drexciya in the early ‘90s, as techno transformed from bleeps to this new kind of hardcore, which at first was very open. I actually see the early Drexciya and L.A.M. (Life After Mutation) in a similar light to Marc Acardipane‘s The Mover ("Nightflight Nonstop to Kaoz") and Mescalinium United ("Reflections of 2017”, “We Have Arrived") as well as Aphex Twin’s Digeridoo EP, especially “Isoprophlex”, which Richard James wrote with Tom Middleton. It was the beginning of anti-social techno—the first wave of true loners and misfits making really powerful individualist techno, actually mentally disturbed individuals. Rock had Roky Erickson, Daniel Johnston, and Syd Barrett, now we had Drexciya.

Aphex Twin - Isoprophlex (AKA Isopropanol) [R&S]

After I received a promo of the first Drexciya on Submerge, I called Mike Banks to give him feedback, and ask if I could have them down for an interview on my then radio show “Crush Collision.” He told me he really appreciated the positive feedback but warned me that they were crazy and would talk about “fucking their mom and Madonna’s tits.” I thought that sounded great, funnier than Slayer’s image. When they eventually came down for an interview, we ran James’ voice through some processing, and Gerald showed up with his face painted half white, half black like that episode on the original Star Trek.

One time I went to visit the Drexciyan studio on the east side of Detroit, and when I walked into the basement I was greeted by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” at full volume. James, who had a poster of a young Malcom X behind him was wearing a paperclip chain hanging from his glasses, asked me if I was surprised. I was like “No, ‘Hydro Cubes,’ the first EP, so much heavy riffing.” Despite the fact that they were best defined by their funk influences combining with the synthesizer music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, especially Juan Atkins’ vision, I really loved how rock they were.

In the ‘70s, also on Detroit’s east side, a group defying stereotypes formed called Death—a black punk band directly influenced by seeing the MC5 and Stooges live at the Grande Ballroom. They never found much success, because their debut album was shelved by Clive Davis of Columbia Records. (He found the band name “too negative.") Jimi Hendryx should have been enough to free us from that stereotype, but Drexciya did not form in a world that had let go of racism.

In what is now a core text of Afrofuturism, Drexciya’s James Stinson reacted to the extremely racist world of Detroit after the 1967 riot (rebellion), and the heavy blame and heavy burden that the surrounding suburbs placed on the decaying Detroit, by creating a special world of his own. A world where the babies who were still inside their mothers when they were thrown overboard during their trans-Atlantic voyage, at the orders the captain, who was finding these pregnant woman a nuisance, didn’t drown and die. No, they learned to breathe underwater, since they already were breathing liquid in their mother’s womb. They found an ancient underwater city and formed an advanced society with unique, advanced technology. There is much more to the concept; they revisit the idea on every record, with every song being visions of this place, another piece of the tapestry that tells the story of the mythic place of Drexciya.

Gerald Donald reacted much differently, expressing the horror of racism with a witty and perverse humor, inventing black fascists who had to “sterilize” the population in his project Dopplereffekt, long before Dave Chapelle’s controversial blind black KKK leader Clayton Bigsby.

Always puzzling was Drexciya’s take on identity. In the era of Facebook and DJs with simple first-name-last-name monikers, it is almost impossible to imagine a group of musicians not wanting to be individually recognized for their work, for wanting the music to speak for itself, for the record to take you somewhere and allow you to interact with it (like notes written in the grooves, song names, or the weird extra backwards bits hidden in between the songs, saying things like “does God really exist? God is virtual reality” and “I want to fuck a plastic bitch"). Their attitudes were those of artisans, craftsmen, workers who did not need to sign their names, because it was already in their unmistakable sound. They refused to allow themselves to be named as individuals, to allow pictures to be printed of them, or even to do a live performance. This probably held them back more than the fact they tried to release every record on a different label, or they didn’t know basic DJ-mixing needs and would have 9-bar intros and 13-bar breakdowns, whatever they felt. I always felt this attitude tied directly into Michigan’s rich history of revolutionary groups, the ones Bowie sang of in “Panic in Detroit.”

The concept and much of the imagination came from James Stinson, but the brilliance of the synthesis came from the incredible mind of Gerald Donald. Gerald was greatly inspired by the Detroit techno revolution of the ‘80s and tried to get his music released on the established local labels, like Hawtin’s Plus 8. Transmat put him in the studio with an also then new-to-the-studio Carl Craig. Derrick May recalls the ghost-like look on Carl’s face as he left the studio: “He was visibly shaken, man. It was not cool. He sang about wanting to fuck his mom.”

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