11. DrexciyaNeptune’s Lair
I came to Drexciya and this kind of electro quite late via UK bass music. There was a period in around 2010 and 2011 when a bunch of UK producers were making almost their take on electro, which was quite clean-sounding. I remember Joe [Seaton, AKA Call Super] saying at the time, ‘This is fine, but you should really listen to some of the proper stuff’. When I heard that, the UK bass music influenced by electro that was around at that time, even though it was well-produced, started to sound a little more bland. Drexciya had this much funkier, raw and weird quality to them. Even though they had a very cohesive sonic palette, every track was somehow different.
In many ways, they were my entry point into a certain kind of sound design, especially for drums, because weird sonics were at the core of their sound in a very analogue way. I don’t want to say it felt more achievable to recreate, but it felt more approachable in terms of piquing my interest to work out how these sounds were made. Where Autechre and Surgeon were both artists at that time that I really admired and would have loved to be able to copy as someone starting out, I felt that I didn’t know where to begin, but with Drexciya, you could identify each sound being idiosyncratic and quirky in its own way, and it made me curious about how they did that. A lot of it wasn’t actually the sound design of course; it was the funkiness, the musicianship and the fact that it was just very soulful music. From a purely sonic angle though, Drexciya introduced me to fucking around with sound design in a more experimental way.
