From Kraftwerk to Daft Punk, anonymity has been a strangely compelling aspect of electronic music. Motivated to act out the music's portrayal of a computer-driven, post-human future, or maybe just by a desire to let the music speak for itself, techno artists have been fond of stepping away from the stage, wearing masks, and weaving alternate, often imaginary storylines in the place of rock's ego-driven approach. But few have taken this as far as Detroit electro act Drexciya.
Remaining anonymous for much of the group's existence, James Stinson and Gerald Donald instead invented a complex mythology describing a future world. According to the sleeve notes of their album "The Quest," Drexciya was an underwater nation not unlike Plato's Atlantis, where the children of slaves thrown off ships had evolved gills to survive underwater. A strange inversion of Sun Ra's space-oriented Afro-futurism, the Drexciyan myth provided a focal point for the band's promotions as well as their musical output, with album and track titles all referencing this future reality.
Drexciya's music could be cold and otherwordly, brutally minimal, or, at times, beautifully melodic, but throughout the sound remained electronic distilled to its purist form, without any trace of 20th century art forms other than the funk rattling through their whiplash 808 percussion.
Of course, it was the music that really made Drexciya one of the most revered electronic acts of all time. Perfecting a variant of electro as radically futuristic as Jeff Mills' techno records were, the band was perhaps as close to Kraftwerk as any of the Detroit innovators - pure, synth driven tones, with none of the organic sounds occassionally favored by some of their contemporaries. Drexciya's music could be cold and otherwordly, brutally minimal, or, at times, beautifully melodic, but throughout the sound remained electronic distilled to its purist form, without any trace of 20th century art forms other than the funk rattling through their whiplash 808 percussion.
Then, tragically, Stinson passed away in 2002 from a heart condition. However, the Drexciyan sound - both in terms of their massive influence on a new generation of electro and techno producers and the continuing musical work of Gerald Donald under other aliases - lives on.
