13.06.2017 by Anna Froelicher

Track Down Fiction—Drexciyans Among Us!

A quiet Saturday evening in an unpretentious European city—a coastal town in southern Italy, say. A few people are doing their Sunday shopping, a couple are getting ready for the club, some are lounging in the piazza. The air hovers, still hot. Everything seems the same as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow. In an alleyway a window is open; through it, you can hear (somewhat fuzzily) the voice of a news moderator: “…Boat capsized again…Mediterranean coast…130 people overboard…dead…” At the end of the alley, an old woman passes on a Vespa. Then, a deep pulsing, at first hardly noticeable but soon at a volume of 120 dB, starts to radiate from the beach. Wwwwumm Wwwwumm. Is it a bass drum? It draws closer. The sea waves carry it to the promenade, to the pizzeria by the church, into the church itself. It sneaks up the staircase into a living room. The clubs open their doors and the pulsing starts to come from there, too, until we can no longer tell whether it has its origins inside of us or spreads like the gushing water of a sonic tsunami around us. A funky hi-hat enters; two, three, four Moog tones…machine rhythms. What does that sound like?

“The Return of Drexciya”: the beats hiss in our ears, pound in our chests, and kidnap everything we own.

What sounds like a screenplay for Roland Emmerich’s Went Mad On The Dancefloor has long been a reality outside of white Hollywood. The history of the Drexciyans begins with the middle passage, when colonized Africans were transported via ship by white masters and kept as slaves in the land of the free. These ships were not only incarnations of a new world trade—they also functioned according to their own rules and laws. Pregnant women were thrown overboard to drown in the waves of the Atlantic because they were of no economic use in the eyes of the slave keepers. In Drexciyan history, although these bodies disappeared under the surface, they never vanished from the collective psyche. They form the cornerstone of Drexciyan history: these pregnant women’s embryos, who had learned to absorb oxygen from amniotic fluid in the womb, were born as premature babies and thus retained this extraordinary ability even after birth. They developed into post-human, underwater beings equipped with massive supplies of aquatic energy.

In Afrofuturist historiography[1], the myth of the Drexciyans, the underwater aliens of the Black Atlantic[2] who “launch their aquatic invasion against audiovisual programmers,”[3] finds its clearest testimony in Drexciya’s The Quest (Submerge Records). The double CD, released in 1997, exposes its producers James Stinson and Gerald Donald as descendants of the Drexciyan species. It finally assigned the duo, whose origins had already been greatly puzzled over, a unique identity—even a unique species. Or was it the other way around?

Anyone who listens to Drexciya tracks like “Hydro Cubes”, “Seaquake” or “Dr. Blowfins’ Black Storm Stabilising Spheres” can attest to their physical impact and will experience how with each wobbling arpeggio the underwater world draws closer to the Western land.

The tragic stories of the men, women and children who drowned on the journey from Africa to Europe due to lack of aid on overcrowded boats are just as relevant today as they were yesterday and before yesterday. What would happen if not only this history of black bodies drowned on ocean crossings by Western fantasies of omnipotence and those fantasies’ fear products were to repeat, but also the origins of the Drexciya legend? What would happen if the children of the victims had joined the Drexciyan Undersea Dwellers and, without us having the slightest idea, mutated in the deep into oxygen-absorbing water bodies as they had never been seen before? What if, in Atlantis, somewhere between Gibraltar and the Tyrrenian Sea, a sound station was erected which continuously and in repetitive impetuses emitted sonic waves to roar against the fortress of Europe and to bring that fortress down again and again in a dancefloor war without arms[4]?

The “aquanergy” of Drexciya can’t have evaporated according to the laws of physics or esotericism. It must rather continue to transform itself and mutate into ever-new aesthetic forms—even if the link from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean remains an idea, there’s sonic evidence that Drexciyan storm troops are still present. This evidence sometimes takes the form of explicit Afrofuturist references, as with Ghetto Sketches (Mathematics, 2016) by Jamal Moss and Keith DeViere Donaldson’s project The Angel Race, or, of course, DJ Stingray[5]—or sometimes it reveals itself as pure attribution, as in imagination or inspiration. On Thug Entrancer’s[6] album Death Afterlife (Software, 2014), one tries to grab hold of a Drexciyan TR-808 here and there to begin a process of estrangement from one’s all-too-human body. Or one might dive into the 160-bpm digital tsunami that wreaks havoc in Jlin’s Dark Energy (Planet Mu, 2015). On Nidia Minaj’s album Danger (Principe Discos, 2015), synthetic drums turn into scuttling alien animations, and on Moro’s fusion project San Benito (NON, 2016), you may even make out the voices that rise again and again from below the waves of the sea. There’s an endless list of tracks you can hear Drexciyanally. What binds all of these tracks, though, is always a small, stubborn doubt: is it still fiction?

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With Drexciya, DJ Stingray, Kodwo Eshun, Paul Gilroy, Jlin, Moro, Nidia Minaj, The Angel Race und Thug Entrancer

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[1]Afrofuturism can be summarized very briefly as an art and science practice that addresses the alienation of black bodies in a white majority society and utilizes these bodies for itself in order to illuminate and break down the state of marginalization.

[2]Eshun, Kodwo: More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Quartet Books, London, 1998, S.98

[3] The term “Black Atlantic” attempts to encapsulate those cultural practices and historical events that have emerged from or are concerned with the African diaspora. “Black Atlantic” stands for a culture of hybrids that escapes clear local and temporal attributions. See also: Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1993

[4]Eshun, Kodwo: More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Quartet Books, London, 1998, S.100

[5] See interview with DJ Stingray in zweikommasieben #15

[6] See interview with Thug Entrancer in zweikommasieben #13

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This text is the first of the three-part series Track Down Fiction by Anna Froelicher. The column is concerned with the connection between music, (science fiction) narrative, and technology, and attempts to examine this connection in a social context that is meaningful or self-evident. The second part of the column called “The CDJ-2000 Species” was published in zweikommasieben #15, while the third—”My T-Shirt in the Field”—was part of zweikommasieben #17.