For whatever reason, over the last month or so I’ve listened to the 2011 compilation release Journey Of A Deep Sea Dweller I — released in 2011 on on the Dutch label Clone — by Detroit electronic duo Drexciya a few times. I’m not sure why, but likely because it came up in conversation as a lot of “prompts” to listen to music usually do, and from there I found myself throwing it on the speakers on numerous occasions. There’s a “tipping point” when you start listening to what to me is a new record I’m taking in where I start to get magnetically pulled into listening to more of the details in the songs.
I’ll totally admit I’m a late bloomer to artists like Drexciya and a lot of the artists associated with the mysterious Underground Resistance label. By late bloomer I mean I was discovering bits of that stuff in my mid to late 20s, in my final years in Vancouver when I was starting to connect with new friends that had grown up in the techno scene in that city. I’d likely heard Drexciya many times in that period at clubs, small after parties and what those friends were playing in general but I was discovering so much of that stuff around then that it was all a lot to process and I wasn’t linking up tracks to artists in my mind at that point.
Before that — especially in the 90s as a teenager — I had an obsessive tunnel-vision with the more punk and hardcore music I was listening to at the time and really bypassed more dance-oriented electronic music in that decade. At that time, from what bits of it I was presented with, I think I perceived the rave/dance scene that was happening in my neck of the woods (British Columbia) as a bit to hippy, drug-reliant and moreover too “trance-y” for me. I’m comparing this all now to the rave scene that was happening in the UK around that time that a lot of my friends here grew up in, and knowing about that scene here now it seemed a lot more musically credible to me over here in the UK, and it was far more common here for people to be into both indie and “alternative rock” music and to listen to the dance and techno stuff that was happening at the same time.
Anyway, where we are is now and as said, I’m a late bloomer. Journey Of A Deep Sea Dweller I came out in 2011 I think and compiled a lot of their early to mid 90s output from their early days, which were previously included on a compilation called The Quest that came out in 1997 and sort of brought the group more into the limelight at the time. And being late on the train I admitedly know little about the duo, who actively have obscured their identities through an interesting and complex “underwater” mythology rooted in afrofuturism. The article below touches more on that in detail.
Known for their experimental and driving style of electro there’s of course “bangers” in those early releases take that style to the max, with tracks like “Depressurization” and “Bubble Metropolis”, but the track I seem to find my gravitating to most is “Dehydration”, a slower more minimal number build around a lot of augmented note progressions that have a strange Bach-ish harpsichord feel. Another track, “Lardossan Funk”, has a similar feel of maze-like chord progressions which I can imagine was done with some key transpositions on the gear the duo were using at the time, and maybe an interest in using some unconventional chord structures.
There’s this great, playful, cartoon-ish villian vibe to “Dehydration” that conjures for me for whatever reason the soundtracks to the late 80s and early 90s instalments of the Castlevania video games comes to mind. Given the duo’s interest in mythology and technology this may have crossed their mind — at least in the sense of taking on board the 8-bit chip feel of video game soundtracks going from the 80s into the 90s. Another Drexciya track — the minimal noise and bloop filled “Take Your Mind” — comes to mind as well.
Overall — a nice little re-discovery that was sort of looming in the shadows for all of these years.