"Black Atlantis: The Art of the Drexciya Mythos"
“Everything that is unknown is part of the myth, and I’m sure that the myth could do more for humanity than anything they ever dreamed possible.” – Sun Ra.
From deep within the dystopian underground of 90s Detroit, the enigmatic electro act Drexciya released a series of limited EPs whose harsh, uncompromising sounds held a generation of electronic music fans in their thrall. Each transmission of “aquatic assault programming” came shrouded in an air of mystery, with the Drexciyan project fitting firmly to the faceless techno archetype: no photos, no interviews, anonymous artwork. And what to make of this consistent aquatic theme? Wavejumper, Hydro Theory, Digital Tsunami... tracks all based around the Roland TR-808 drum machine with syncopated kick drum patterns and electronic emulations of breakbeats. All were reputedly played live, and every record evoked an underwater army laying siege to the world’s dancefloors. 1994’s Aquatic Invasion carried the following text on the inlay:
"The dreaded Drexciya stingray and barracuda battalions were dispatched from the Bermuda Triangle. Their search and destroy mission to be carried out during the Winter Equinox of 1995 against the programmer strongholds. During their return journey home to the invisible city one final mighty blow will be dealt to the programmers. Aquatic knowledge for those who know."
With little other communication save the sounds and the song titles, Drexciya’s mystique looked to have achieved a perfect impenetrability. Their 1997 concept album The Quest, released on the Detroit techno label Submerge, then duly arrived with some remarkable sleevenotes:
“During the greatest Holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?”
This origin story would have provided a way in for any listeners daunted by the music’s hostility. By creating a narrative around the traumas of history, Drexciya turned social reality into science fiction, adding another layer of meaning to what may just have been considered purely functional sounds. The British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun saw this as being of a piece with Black American music’s space fixation:
“By inventing another outcome for the Middle Passage, this sonic fiction opens a bifurcation in time which alters the present by feeding back through its audience - you, the landlocked mutant descendent of the Slave Trade... If the dominant strain in Afrodiasporic pop culture stresses the human, the soul, then the post-soul, post-human tendency Drexciya belong to rejects the human species by identifying with the alien.”
In 2002 the Drexciyan project came to an abrupt close when the group’s James Stinson died suddenly aged 32 of a heart condition. That same year, Eshun formed The Otolith Group with the filmmaker Anjalika Sagar, their film Hydra Decapita eventually being nominated for the 2010 Turner Prize. Hydra Decapita took as its point of departure the Drexciyan fabulation, turning this into a meditation on dehumanisation in capitalist systems. Visually, the film depicts hypnotic high-contrast close-ups of flickering water as a mysterious narrator imagines pan-galactic stretches of water-space. Hydra Decapita also references JMW Turner’s 1840 painting The Slave Ship and John Ruskin’s 1845 defence of that painting, which the Otolith Group sees as “an inaugural moment for art criticism in England.” Eshun described the filmmakers’ tracing of connections between seemingly disparate narratives in an interview with the art podcast Bad at Sports:
“Visually, the film is extremely monochromatic. It’s also based on singing, so you get a film that has a desolate eeriness to it. And all of this is our way of trying to apprehend abstraction. The idea is that financial capitalism works through abstract processes that nonetheless have real effects, which means that our language, aesthetically speaking, has to become as abstract as reality itself. It also relates to constructing nonlinear relations to the present.”
Also attempting to bring this mythos to a contemporary art audience is the American painter Ellen Gallagher, whose Watery Ecstatic series, begun in 1997, uses a variation on scrimshaw by carving images into the surface of thick sheets of watercolor paper and drawing with ink, watercolor, and pencil. Speaking to the website Art21, Gallagher explained her method:
“In 2001 I started making a sequence of films called Murmur, from the Watery Ecstatic drawings. The first film—also titled Watery Ecstatic—refers most literally to the drawings, in terms of the way the paper is cut and the drawing done over it. It’s this moment of being submerged; there’s a marine mountain and these heads bobbing up and down in the waves. It’s very crudely done. It’s real and mythological at the same time, this underwater black Atlantis—Drexciya.”
Inspired by Eshun’s theories, the filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu shot the eerie 10 minute film Drexciya in an abandoned public swimming pool in Accra, Ghana in 2010. As villagers wander around the dilapidated hotel, an ambient watery soundtrack plays and failed capitalist fantasies are acted out. Another short titled Drexciya was released in 2012 by the German director Simon Rittmeier, depicting a shipwreck survivor wandering the deserts of Burkina Faso while carrying a fragment of light fence. Joining with three young Africans, they try to reach the “next megacity” of Drexciya.
Throughout all these diverse projects, artists and filmmakers have worked to connect a tragic historical narrative with the radical discontinuities of the present. The Drexciya sound is defiantly uncommercial and often willfully alienating, but then this was never about entertainment. As The Unknown Writer of The Quest sleevenotes originally proclaimed: "Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us? How and why do they make their strange music? These are many of the questions that you don't know and never will."