Drexciya Day 2019 and new information
The first of the Drexciya Day events has been confirmed and for the first time there will be one in Reykjavik, Iceland. It happens on Friday 30th August and they will be starting with a special Drexciya quiz and then there will be DJs playing Drexciyan music. The venue is the perfectly named Vinyl Bistro, sounds perfect, hopefully this will give some of you ideas too. There are a few more in the pipeline, I will add them to this post as soon as I have details.
Manchester's Eastern Bloc Record shop are now on-board too with an event planned for 6th September.
Latest Dates
More details behind Drexciya Day below...
The anniversary of James Stinson's death will be in just over a month's time, 3rd September. He would have been 50 this year! Since 2017 fans around the world have been celebrating his music on or around that date on what has become known as Drexciya Day. As previously I am very happy to promote any events that people feel like organising this year.
As before, they don't have to be something big, just a party in a bar or cafe will do. So far over the last two years there have been events in Tallinn, Vienna, Cambridge, London, Dublin, Birmingham, Glasgow, Rome, Manchester and on radio. There is no guarantee that the same people will do it again in these places, best to go ahead and organise it yourself if you want (as soon as I get confirmation of one I will post details).
Search online for previous Drexciya Days to get ideas. If anyone wants to organise such an event please let me know and I will be very happy to share it. Email or contact me through the DRL FB page with an FB event link or whatever. Thanks. Life Is Fast Ending, So Live!
I was sent a faxed promo sheet for Drexciya's debut 12" EP on Shockwave Records. You can make out a lot more detail of the label image. I may be wrong but I think it's the underwater statue of Christ near Cozumel, Mexico in Chankanab park. Statue number 5 at this link and below.
I also found this pic (below) on Instagram of a very rare fax sent out by Robert Hood's Hardwax label in 1992 to promote the pre-Drexciyan project, L.A.M. (Life After Mutation). I can spot a few more Drexciya/Submerge faxes in the shot as well and possibly the other side of it would have been the record's promo sheet/press release. Before email, sending out faxes was another way to help promote sales with record shops and magazines.
On a hunch I contacted Stewart Caig of the now defunct English label, Digital Soul (2001-2005), because in 2002 its website was linked on James Stinson's Dimensional Waves website. I was wondering if James had ever made contact, perhaps about giving them some of his music to release.
This is part of Stewart's kind and prompt response (he hadn't been aware of the link on the DW site), "...that was so long ago. I remember getting an email from James who said he was reaching out to smaller labels and wanting to put some music out. We exchanged a few emails, but it didn't come to anything and then soon after that he passed away. Since then I'd questioned whether it really was him and certainly at the time I remember thinking that he might have mistook my label for something bigger than what it was, but I was obviously not aware of the full circumstances back then. Good to know I didn't imagine it at least. I certainly got the impression that he had plenty of music he wanted to get out and often wondered how much of it ever saw the light of day."
It's great to get this insight to how James was still wave jumping right up to the end (the term he used for working with different labels around the world) and quite tantalising to note he had lots of unreleased music he wanted to find an outlet for (some of which has now been released by Clone Records).
By chance I had actually heard of Digital Soul around this time as Irish producer and DJ Derek Carr released a 12" EP on the label in 2002. I wonder which of the label's releases had come to James' attention for him to reach out? Quite possibly it actually was Carr's as Anthony Shakir was to work on a remix of 'Synapse 136' (Stewart has been in touch to say that in the end Shake remixed another track but it was never released) and Andrew Duke (who interviewed James in 1999) had included the original version in one of his DJ sets. So this (very Detroit sounding) track had already made a strong impression with at least two people connected to James.
Also, according to Mike Banks' talk with Red Bull Music Academy, James was working at UR's Somewhere in Detroit record shop (not sure exactly when) and I can imagine every vaguely techno record in the world must have been sent to it. Making this a perfect location to discover potentially sympathetic labels for his music. Stewart has now let me know that yes he did send a copy of all his released to Mike Banks care of SID, so quite likely James got to discover Digital Soul that way.
You can stream many of Digital Soul's fine releases on You Tube if you check out their Discogs listing.
This is a new 20 minute documentary about Detroit Techno and how it spread to Berlin and the world. Drexciya feature right at the beginning and end.
New Arpanet date confirmed for Berlin, Solar One Music label night, awesome line-up too, 20th September. There are currently two Dopplereffekt shows upcoming as well.
Buying this remix record is another great way you can help Victoria Lukas (Zerkalo) fight cancer, full details at this Fundamental Records link. You can listen to the new remixes of 'Skylar' here.
posted by Stephen at
5:04 PM
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