Glasgow produce and DJ Ufaze treats us to a bucketload of top electro tunes as he celebrates the imminent launch of his Slow Process label
Loads of labels are doing reissues but few pursue this activity with the same singularity as Clone. Over the past few years, the Dutch label has focused on re-releasing music by Detroit electro act Drexciya via the excellent Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller series. Those compilations brought together many of Drexciya’s hard to find tracks on remastered vinyl, making music that had previously only been available on rare original pressings to fans and DJs with extremely deep pockets. Now Clone applies the same approach to another ultra-rare Drexciya-related project.
A James Stinson rarity and a Gerald Donald album will arrive on Clone’s Drexciya-dedicated sub-label in December.
Unreleased Drexciya versions and a new edition of the Der Zyklus album are due on Clone’s sub-label dedicated to the work of Gerald Donald.
I interviewed Drexciya’s James Stinson twice. The first occasion was for the release of 1999’s Neptune’s Lair, the second was ahead of the original release of The Opening of the Cerebral Gate in 2001. Both interviews are no longer available; the first was published on a website that ceased operations in 2002, the second appeared in a print magazine that suffered the same fate around the same time. Stupidly, both pieces were on a computer that gave up the ghost and was not backed up.
Classic Drexciya, Italian improvisational music featuriung Ennio Morricone and the soundtrack from one of the greatest action movies ever made feature in August’s best reissues.
It looks like 2013 is the year that refuses to give up. We’re less than two weeks from Christmas, and the big records continue to arrive.
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The fourth and final in the Deep Sea Dweller series is also the most anticipated for those who have followed Stinson and Donald on their spellbinding path. More than the previous compilations, this edition offers a multitude of riches, bringing the listener back to the start of the Drexciya journey. It starts with the hyperactive funk bass, chattering drums and surreal synth lines of “Depressurization”, which appeared on their 1992 EP for Shockwave, also called Deep Sea Dweller. It also takes in the mock-horror intro as well as the militaristic electro of “Mantaray” and the shimmering, spine-tingling electronic warmth of “Water Walker” all from 1994’s Drexciya 4: The Unknown Aquazone.
The final compilation of reissued Drexciya material will arrive on Clone’s Classic Cuts label in December.
The Detroit pair return under the NRSB-11 banner with a new album for the Brussels label WéMè Records.
We live in a rampant reissue culture: it’s more or less impossible to keep up with the number of historical curios being dug up, dusted down and re-released on a weekly basis, with labels becoming increasingly adventurous and thorough in their restoration of past material. The best reissues, of course, are the ones that go the extra yard, with an obsessive level of attention to detail. A common trait of the people behind these select releases is an unquenchable enthusiasm for bringing old sounds to new ears that seeps through the records and into the music.
There are a few labels who specialise in releasing quality reissues alongside their new output, with Dutch imprints Clone and Rush Hour both releasing seminal material from the vaults of New York and Detroit’s electronic music canon this year. Others, such as Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave and Spencer Hickman’s Death Waltz, exist with a stated focus on (re)releasing overlooked, seminal and obscure material from the past. Musically our top 10 is varied selection, ranging from Drexciya’s underwater electro to Donnie & Joe Emerson’s funk-infused bedroom pop and remastered material from musique concrète progenitor Pierre Schaeffer. Alan Howarth and John Carpenter’s seminal score for Escape From New York also makes the list, as does French outfit In Aeternam Vale’s criminally under-appreciated 1980s proto techno opus Dust Under Brightness.
Long time Drexciya affiliate Sherard Ingram will release his second album under the DJ Stingray moniker, F.T.N.W.O, next month on Belgian imprint WéMè Records.
The journey beneath continues as Clone prepare to unleash the third round of remastered and reissued material from the Drexciya discography, including two previously unreleased tracks.
Following the first installment of Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller, Clone delves back into Drexciya’s archives for the follow-up. Like the first release, the Dutch label has been granted access to tracks from the Detroit duo’s earlier releases, including Bubble Metropolis and The Unknown Aquazone, which fetch hundreds of pounds online. Invariably, some owners of these original releases will balk at the music’s exclusivity being lost. These are the same kind of people who used to hurl insults from behind the counter at people who came in to browse releases in the local record store and should not be given any credence. Others, including this writer, who own original releases, laud Clone for remastering and repressing Drexciya’s early work and making it available to a new generation of people whose appreciation of electro does not start and end with Deadmaus.
Despite being billed as “Drexciyan DJ Stingray” in the early stages of his career, Sherard Ingram never formally collaborated with the duo that lent him his prefix. Having known Drexciya’s James Stinson and Gerald Donald from his time working in a Detroit record store he was recruited by the pair as an official tour DJ, but it was the formation of that relationship that gave Ingram an outlet to create music as DJ Stingray. As mentor/apprentice relationships go, it’s an unconventional one, and one that Ingram seems to have been left to develop on his own terms. Arguably, he has brought his own political angle to the sound of sub-aquatic techno with his productions, which has earned him his own place in the Drexciyan mythos, but this collaboration with Donald (aka Heinrich Mueller) is still long overdue.
‘May you live in interesting times’ says the Chinese proverb, and to call the challenges posed by modern life interesting is a massive understatement. But can a collection of tracks that are over 15 years old provide the soundtrack for the ‘interesting’ times we live in?
Those subscribed to the Clone mailouts will no doubt have been thrilled by the news that the Rotterdam based record label and shop were undertaking an extensive reissue program of the Drexciya back catalogue via the Clone Classics offshoot. The first release has now been announced, in the shape of Journey Of The Deep Sea Dweller Part 1.