Inside 'Neptune’s Lair': Drexciya, Dystopia and Afrofuturism

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“Could it be possible for humans to breath underwater?”[1] – so begin the sleeve notes to Drexciya’s inaugural 1997 album The Quest. Emerging in the early 90s alongside figures such as Octave One and Underground Resistance, Drexciya was a second-wave electro duo based in the post-industrial homeland of Detroit techno. Drawing from the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Drexciya augmented their visionary sound of electro-techno with a retrofuturist mythology of sunken wormholes, webbed mutants and abyssal planes. The music itself was appropriately fluid. Bass that lurched up-pitch like magma through the ocean floor, damp hi-hats and ambient fogs of austere oceanic depth. During their active years Drexciya released a total of three Studio Albums, nine EPs and three Singles. Since their untimely dissolution following the death of its cofounder James Stinson in 2002, Dutch record label Clone Records has released four Compilation Albums charting their full sonic journey, from the nautical jungle of Drexciya to the ‘Red Hills of Lardossa’ on Mars; even the ‘grava theory’ of their final album release, Grava 4 (2002): a “single, continuous super-field that contains and mediates all energy, mass, space and time.”[2] Following from our inaugural quote, the short textual preface found in The Quest’s sleeve notes continues on to solidify the former and most essential of these speculative visions: the Drexciyan mythology of an underwater cosmos – one which had been slowly building since their first 12” EP release on UR’s label Submerge Records in 1992, Deep Sea Dweller:

Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorise 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 and why do they make their strange music? What is their Quest?[3]

Through an assemblage of album and track titles, cover art and sleeve notes, Drexciya is portrayed as an underwater realm deep within the Atlantic Ocean, inhabited by the unborn children of pregnant African women hurled overboard slave ships during “the greatest holocaust the world has ever known.”[4] Populated by a sub-aquatic archipelago of cartographic track listings – ‘Danger Bay’, ‘Positron Island’, ‘Bubble Metropolis’ and so on – the subterranean universe provides a fictional setting for the establishment of a new maritime species: the Drexciyans, a race of amphibian ‘wave jumpers’ strategically poised to invade the shores of American soil in packs of “stingray and barracuda battalions.”[5] Sporadically teaming with agents of Underground Resistance for covert black ops in the “ongoing war against planetary Control,”[6] the eponymous frogmen – armed with tridents, webbed feet and diving masks – are militarized posthuman cyborgs, launching a sub-terrestrial attack on the collapsing beaches of Western modernity (Fig.1). Equally home to the likes of Mutant Gillmen, Lardossans and Darthouven Fish Men, the shadowy waters of Drexciya are a melting pot of synthetic diasporic victims. Forced into a pelagic adaptation of digital technologies and guerrilla warfare, the mutant protagonists of Drexciya’s aqua-theatre are stand-ins for the anonymity of Drexciya’s real, human faces; twin characters engaged in a perpetual state of what Kodwo Eshun refers to as “open secrecy.”[7]

The productions of Drexciya, whilst widely popular and still influential, were never known through their human counterparts. Stinson and cofounder Gerald Donald (now lead member of electro outfit Dopplereffekt) were radically withdrawn from any vehicle of standard media representation. Indignant to interviews during their active years, with those given reading more like cryptic transmissions sent from submerged laboratories or cosmic Beta waves, and with no photographs or live performances, Drexciya obscured any humanistic reading of their music. Any means of concretising, or as Deleuze & Guattari would say, ‘facialising’ the duo was systematically rejected, or at best made into another function of the mytho-poetic machine: “If the face is a politics, dismantling the face is also a politics involving real becomings, an entire becoming-clandestine.”[8] This obfuscation was a sentiment shared by figures in the 90s, such as Underground Resistance and Berlin’s Basic Channel label, with contemporary stars such as DJ Stingray (his name a clear reference of his indebtedness to the work of Drexciya) still wearing his signature balaclava. As Eshun goes on to establish, the function of their practice was not simply music but a sonic fiction. Curtailing usual modes of narrativization common in cultural criticism, this “can be understood as the convergence of the organisation of sound with a fictional system whose fragments gesture towards but fall short of the satisfaction of narrative.”[9] Thus from an early stage we can see how the apparatus of Drexciya’s Afrofuturist myth is fundamentally concerned with an open-ended means of analysis; the closure of monolithic narratives and essentialist forms is integral to the mode of Drexciyan identity established through the means of its sonic fiction. Furthermore: 

By the 1980s, the emergent digital technology of sequencers, samplers, synthesizers, and software applications began to scramble the ability to assign identity and thereby racialize music. [And if] racial identification became intermittent and obscure to the listener, for the musician, a dimension of heteronomy became available.[10] 

This is to say, in the words of the late Mark Fisher, that the rise of Detroit techno “was best enjoyed as an anonymous electro-libidinal current that seemed to pass through producers, as a series of affects and FX that were de-linked from authors.”[11] This anonymity allowed musicians to create sonic fictions where there was no ‘true’ narrative to uncover – no essential ‘being’ behind their subjective enunciations.

Given this sense of becoming over being, Drexciya are typically seen within a sub-genre of Afrofuturism – an ongoing umbrella term for cultural practices which entwine futurism, liberation and experimentation through a black cultural lens (what Drexciya call the R.E.S.T Principle – Research, Experimentation, Science and Technology). Whether it be the virological endemics of Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novels, the astro-Egyptian jazz of Sun Ra, or the meditative, hybrid fiction of John Akomfrah’s 1996 documentary The Last Angel of History, Afrofuturism is concerned with instrumentalising the future into a political technique of the present; a method of preprograming ourselves in the here and now, using the aesthetic power of fiction as its metaphysical force. This cross-temporality brings into question the role of ‘the future’ as such: what formulations this takes under contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalism, what relationship this hybridity has to modernity per se, and what opportunities it thus affords cultural practitioners for the creation of new subjective frameworks. In asserting the role of identity as process, and with music as its mode of enactment par excellence, I will argue for an efficacy of Sonic Fiction in the modification and productive constitution of different subject-becomings outside of the logic of what Gilroy describes as black essentialism’s distinct yet symbiotic dual function. That of pan-Afrocentricity and libertarian pluralism; two varieties of the same essentialism: “one ontological, one strategic.” I will argue that in this regard Sonic Fiction is a hyper-tool, beamed from the future and inserted into the cogs of the present social machine, substituting for identity a new technology of the self, limitlessly open to new technical configurations.

[1] Sleeve Notes to The Quest (1997); Submerge Recordings.

[2] Nettrice Gaskins, ‘Deep Sea Dwellers: Drexciya and the Sonic Third Space,’ in Shima, No. 10, Vol. 2 (2016) pp. 78. 

[3] Notes to The Quest.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Sleeves Notes to Aquatic Invasion (1995); Underground Resistance.

[6] Kodwo Eshun, ‘Drexciya as Spectre,’ in Matter Fictions, ed. M. Mendes (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016) pp. 38.

[7] Ibid., 36.

[8] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) pp. 188.

[9] Matter Fictions, 33. 

[10] Kodwo Eshun, Future Considerations on Afro-Futurism,’ in The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003) pp. 296.

[11] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014) pp. 32. 

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Rave as Ecology: Plugging In

In 2011 Urbanomic published Fanged Noumena - a collection of writings from influential British philosopher turn NRx posterboy Nick Land. Along with writers such as Sadie Plant and Kodwo Eshun, Land had spent the 90s in Britain traversing a hysteria of alienating forces, from the further onslaught of neoliberal capital to the emergent roles of algorithmic technologies and cyberspace. Given this climate he was no stranger to the ruthless affectivity of electronic music and rave culture in expressing these social tendencies, following its descent into the darker techno derivatives of what Simon Reynolds called the 90s ‘hardcore continuum’ - a sonic wormhole stretching from Doomcore to Jungle to Gabber.

For Land, raving was a lucid expression of our nascent posthumanism, a place where identity fractured as we came to embody new cybernetic pleasures. It is for this reason  that in one of two epigraphs introducing Land’s texts, the late Mark Fisher quotes his little known essay, ‘No Future’ - an ode to the intensities of 90s techno-culture. Along with Land, Fisher recognised rave music’s inherent necro-libidinal charge; its ability to express wider cultural forces. He quotes, rave was our “impending human extinction becoming accessible as a dancefloor.”[1]

Cover Image for The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum #1: Hardcore Rave (1992)

For the past 5 years or so I have watched this psychic extinction play out. Every weekend thousands continue to cram into derelict warehouses, mildew archways and fetid cauldrons. All hellbent on chemical highs and loops of acidic bass. Bodies are carved out of the dark terrain by schizophrenic lasers, their movements pulsing through dense smoke like military optics laced with amphetamine. Catatonic stares and abject grins aligned toward the fortified DJ booth, its messianic presence enfusing each dancer with a sermonic frenzy. Given its darker side it isn’t hard to see the apocalyptic edge of raving. Crowds of half-vacant minds and wonky irises; anaemic thoughts chewed up like pulp.

Raves and rave culture are for many a pristine example of contemporary escapism. Where the young go to ‘get away’ from the responsibilities of daily life or the onslaught of social alienation; burying their heads in the warm bosom of synthetic drum kits and modular FX. A collective orgasm mixed with wild entropy. For some this is just another sordid example of a generation gone completely wrong: ‘Living for the weekend’ - albeit with a uniquely dystopian edge; the latest wave of youth to be sucked into the hypnotic prism of low frequencies, dry mouths and euphoric highs. In this case, raves are not simply a dystopia in waiting but a real time eschatology; a hyperstition of full-blown planetary meltdown.

None of this is new of course. Raves are the latest in a long history of Dionysiac spaces. From the Epicurean Garden to the salons and clubs of French libertines. In aesthetics too, from Athenian tragedies to Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of Medieval carnival, even Nietzsche’s Wagner before he ‘crept back to the cross’. These were and still are spaces where social codes dissolve under the dual glow of moral skepticism and hedonistic pleasure. Places where mutual trust and collective anonymity help engender joyful acts of social transgression. ‘Losing oneself’ in a swarm of like-minded clubbers, the prosaic gestures of shared water and gum establishing a subtle aura of communistic good will from which to freely express one’s self.

What’s interesting to me, however, is the assumption of escape. That raves and rave music are about experiencing something exterior. Something outside of the banal platitudes of humdrum ‘reality’. For in this sense, is it not antithetical then to assert the ‘accessibility’ of posthuman dissolution, through what could be translated as a mode of experiential withdrawal? To withdraw and access in the same movement?

This could have been true of rock. In so far as the gig or the stadium concert was an imaginary experience filtered through autobiographical or social realist criticism; pre-defined stories waiting to be interpreted by the listener. Particular to the 90s, Fisher was a keen critic of the “reactionary pantomime of Britpop”,[2] which by establishing a monolithic identity of white British culture ignored what was new and exciting about the decade: cultural pluralism, accelerating technology and genre hybridity. As Reynolds attests, the anxiety-curing swagger of faux British chauvinism - whether or not to see Oasis or Blur at Glastonbury ‘94 - was not translatable to the basic principles of rave’s enthralled dancefloors. Instead of receding into the carceral identities of monoethnic Britain, raving was a process of creating something new.

For its followers, the appeal of rave’s lucent strobes, dark atmospheres and crystal drips was not to be found in typical forms of aesthetic consumption. For those on the inside, the revolutionary potential lied in the fact that “rave constructs an experience.”[3]

In this sense raves are in fact machines; or what Deleuze and Guattari would call a ‘desiring-machine’. They are an integrated system of technology and labour which produces experience. Rave’s dancefloor is an assemblage of psychological, chemical, electronic and corporeal software, rigged up through neurons, electrons, chemicals and sound waves. A decentralised and nonhierarchical cybernetic system, melding technology, matter and affect into a horizontal flow of collective acceleration. It’s function as an experience is like that of a factory, constructing intensities that each component plugs in and responds to: lights/wavelengths, drugs/hormones, clothes/textures, mixers/frequencies, dancers/bodies, “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.”[4

In a rave set acid synths are left to gargle into obscurity whilst relentless break-cuts fold endlessly back into themselves. Tracks evolve without narrative and emotions surge forth without aim; crescendos ascend to infinity and micro-sonic blips dissolve as quickly as they first appeared. Devoid of any clear determination each element is connected to a real-time feedback loop of continuous matter-energy, substituting a progressive and linear perception of time with a cyclic repetition of singular events; what Nietzsche would call the ‘eternal return’. A series of techno-somatic events that flows through you and into the next.

Raves are sex without genitals, pleasure without climax. Dial in, jack up and get loose.

So where’s the escape? If anything, to me raving is about plugging into something extra. Something that is always more than one. The contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton would call this mode of perception ‘ecology’. The disintegration of anthropocentric boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture; or the auxiliary dualisms of mind/body, inside/outside. Ontologically speaking, in our day-to-day experience of phenomena we usually run on this default setting: the banal plateau of Kantian epistemology. That there is something fundamentally different about us ‘in here’ and the world ‘out there’ - and that we will never access the world ‘in itself’. Being part of rave shatters this assumption.

Fully immersed on the dancefloor, every raver comes to see themself less as an isolated subject and more like a desiring-machine; a blend of human and non-human intensities, plugged into the different material registers of the rave. Bodies are no longer fleshy lumps of tissue and bone detached from the mind, they are portals. Wormholes to the prepersonal continuum of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘The Body without Organs’ - an immanent plane of proto-subjective soup that connects a hand cocked liked a pistol to a Kenwood subwoofer, a rush of serotonin to the neon glow of a UV blacklight.

CXEMA Rave – Kiev, Ukraine

Even the most personal sensations are deindividuated, the almost telepathic level of empathy felt on Ecstasy are akin to what Richard Smith calls ‘a communism of the emotions.’ Piece by piece, mix by mix ravers are dissolved into an orgiastic sense of connectivity. To the sound, the space, the electricity. To each other. Soon it is hard to discern where ‘you’ start and where ‘they’ or ‘it’ ends. Electro-libidinal wires are crisscrossed and welded together. Currents of sonic energy and dopamine rerouted through neighbouring bodies and technical apparatus. “An oozy yearn, a bliss-ache, a trembley effervescence that makes you feel like you’ve got champagne for blood.”[5]

Raving is a spectral game. Objects of desire are replaced by liminal intensities; tempos devoured by pure speed. Whilst to some degree our ‘access’ to the experience of raving remains similar to other musical or quotidian events - after all, no one is denying Kant’s metaphysics of sense, albeit filtered through a Nietzschean body that is both eternal and different.  The point is, it’s not really a question of our access at all. The beauty of raving, and the ecological aspect of its experience, is that you come to sense how you yourself are accessed. The neatly shrink-wrapped subjectivity that we all covet and protect almost floats around outside of you, endlessly warped and permeable to the collective flows of rave’s electro-chemical highs. For ravers, it becomes less a question of escaping reality, and more a drive to be accessed by reality. Frightened as we all are of the insidious poverty of our day-to-day sensations, a mode of being which is always-already once removed from the inherent multiplicity of posthuman becoming.

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[1] Nick Land, ‘No Future,’ in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 – 2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011) pp. 398.

[2] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014) pp. 40.

[3] Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (London: Picador, 1998) pp. xix.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) pp. 2.

[5] Renyolds, xxv.