Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Drexciya Marathon

Hi everyone. Time for some music from another of my favourite artists: Drexciya. Drexciya are from Detroit and make electro and techno mainly. There were two of them and they produced lots more music under different alias's both together and separately. Its some of the best music on the planet. Sadly one of them, James Stinson, died in 2002. Thats James on the right. Supposedly. They were a mysterious bunch who remained completely anonymous until his death. Most of the early material appeared on UR, and is proper raw, live, dance your arse off analog electro. Their 1997 double album 'The Quest' being a good starter if you're looking to get a bunch of it. Warning: Expensive!!!

In the 2 years preceding his demise Stinson produced 7 (seven!) LP's under various secretive alias's either alone or with Gerald Donald (no one really knows) released on various worldwide labels.
He knew he was sick, but I never found out if he knew he was dying. The explosion of creativity and general vibe of the music that resulted suggests to me that he knew. If the idea of good art is to be able to express feelings through abstract means then this guy fucking nails it. And if anyone else can recommend me 7 (seven!) albums created in two years by one artist as good as these, well, I'll bare my arse in Burtons' window.

Without wishing to get too wishy washy all the great themes appear to be explored over these 7 'Storms'. Love, Life, Death for example. I prefer these albums to the earlier Drexciya sound. To me they're more cerebral, more emotional, and more experimental. More introspective too I think.

Gerald also appears to be an interesting character with fascinations for Germany, Nuclear Physics, Japan, Porn, Extra-Terrestrial life and pop music amongst others. His Dopplereffeckt outfit started doing retro-Kraftwerkian stuff and then created two of my favourite experimental/ambient electro albums ever. Cold. Arpanet is another alias with 2 incredible strings and vocoders electro outings. (and a bit of a duffer/way-out-there album in between). Definate sense of humour in these recordings. May appear cheesy to smart-arses: this is bollocks. The Japanese Telecom album I have is also a beaut.

So as you can probably tell, between them, they released a ton of good music. My good man Toby from Bleep43 compiled 3 hours of it for one his podcasts a while back and he's kindly lent it to me to put up here. If any of you are in Europe and want to hear some amazing music in a great space I can highly recommend the Bleep nights. Real underground cutting edge music and super nice people. And you might be able to smoke. I think they have Pole, Surgeon, Dj Pete coming over the next few months. And some guy I've never even heard of called Scorn who's bound to be fucking brilliant.

Enough shit, here's the music.



Buy The Chuffing Music Too!