Dopplereffekt interview, mix and live dates, Drexciya research and more

Dopplereffekt have live shows lined up for Berghain, Berlin on 13th March and then a string of US dates in May in New York, San Francisco and Detroit. They will also play the kmental festival in Amsterdam in July. All details via Resident Advisor here.

"This collection of musical pieces was arranged to demonstrate the diverse spectrum of aesthetic and styles of electronic music and textures. The objective: a higher dimensional experience, a stellar gate."

To promote Dopplereffekt's most recent 12" EP, Metasymmetry, there is a video by Shohei Fujimoto for 'Time Modulation-Graviton Pulse'. Dopplereffekt made also made a new various artists mix (see quote above) for Mixmag, you can listen here. For the first time in over ten years, Marcus Barnes has a new interview with Dopplereffekt for Mixmag here.

'Truth Matrix' 12" by Der Zyklus is now listed for pre-order on Bleep (rel. 27th Feb, although clone.nl says 23rd). 

At Juno you can pre-order and listen to a short sample of the new 'Algoirithmic Error (Heinrich Mueller System Restrictions)' remix on Protocolo Sysex's Geometria Virtual EP. Bandcamp link here..

There are six excellent 20 minute podcasts which were made to tie-in with Techno: The Rise of Detroit’s Machine Music, an exhibition at MSU Museum at Michigan State University. I only found out about this myself and sadly it's over but it ran during 2025.

One of them focuses on Drexciya for about five minutes (Episode 5: Worldbuilding and Techno): In this episode alone there are exclusive interviews with Ingrid Lafleur, Tobias c. van Veen, Mike Banks and AduQadim Haqq. All the podcasts are hosted by the curator of the exhibition Julian Chambliss.

"This is a fun project, something fun and mysterious. It's a mystery, chasing around the world all the different stuff. Some of these might be hard and tricky to figure out. To us, it's fun." 

"We jump around the world to different ports around the world through our production company. Not too many people can we do what we do and survive. A lot of people stay in one port and rely on their back catalogue. For us, our lives are so abstract and the way we do things is so spontaneous, we need room to breathe. We need to fly, we need to spread ourselves around the world." 

- both quotes of James Stinson to Tim Pratt (Detroit Free Press 2002).

I certainly had fun making this map of some of the locations revealed in Drexciya's music, the labels they have worked with and a few other places they had connections with. If you can think of anything I've missed please let me know. 

"The second Dopplereffekt album was just noise. I told him: I understand you, I understand your development, but I know nobody will buy it. Nobody will play it, but I'll release it because it's your artistic evolution. I turned down the next Dopplereffekt album, which I regret now. It was never released."

One of my readers let me know about this recent interview with DJ Hell for Groove. I never knew they had an unreleased album, hopefully one day it will see the light of day and fill that mysterious void between Linear Accelerator (2003) and Calabi Yau Space (2007). 

I've previously made the connection between Drexciya's 'Nautilus 12' from their debut EP Deep Sea Dweller (1992) with the fictional submarine captained by Nemo featured in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874). However, if I include the 12 part, it might be a reference to the very real USS 0-12 aka Nautilus (1916-1931).

It might just be a coincidence, however, in keeping with Drexciya, it was used for exploration, had a laboratory and conducted experiments under the Arctic Circle at the end of its life (this was when it was retitled Nautilus). Read more about it here.

I was looking at the numbers on Drexciya's The Unknown Aquazone (1994) double pack: 'You're Now Entering The Fusion Zone 1.90 E and You're Now Entering The Basalt Zone 

3.65X'.  I thought the E might stand for east and therefore could be a line of longitude, making the other latitude. Thanks to Google AI and double checking on a physical atlas I got something of a surprise when the point of intersection was in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Gulf of Guinea, just south of the border between Ghana and Togo (West Africa).

If you take the other two numbers from the B-sides, Zone 2.37Q and Zone 4.97Z and again use them as longitude and latitude you get another point in the ocean not far from the Gulf of Guinea. However, if you reverse them you get a more specific result in The Bight of Benin, again another oceanic location, which can also be seen on the map. Perhaps this is me making things fit but all the numbers point to a location somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea.

The coastal region of the Gulf of Guinea is historically known as The Slave Coast and was a main departure point for millions of African slaves to the Americas and elsewhere from the 1500s to 1800s. This previously unknown aquazone location (given by Drexciya in 1994) of course ties in very well with one of The Unknown Writer aka UR's Cornelius Harris' suggested origin stories from The Quest (1997) sleeve notes. As I've written here before, the idea of Drexciyans as the offspring of pregnant African slaves thrown overboard during transportation took on a life of its own through journalists, artists and fans even within James Stinson's lifetime but he himself never confirmed or denied the possibility (although by 2002's Grava 4 he seemed to place the Drexciyan origin as deep outer space in the Drexciya Home Universe). The only time he mentions Africa and or slavery is in the same quote he gave to John Osselaer (Techno Tourist) towards the end of his life in 2002, "Some of the things of slavery will tell more when the time comes. Stay tuned! I can only tell you a little bit now. After the storm is over I will tell the story. What I can tell you is that in Africa we have a dimensional jump hole. Tell you more later." 

This location now gives much more weight to the possibility that certainly at this early stage, James Stinson's own thinking behind Drexciyans was connected to Africa and perhaps even slavery.  I personally like to think both origin stories can be connected and I think even James was trying to do this with his dimensional jumphole in Africa (to link to the Drexciya Home Universe?) but that is just my opinion. While the Gulf of Guinea is not "in Africa", this aquazone might be an underwater city or base, perhaps even the Bubble Metropolis itself! It's totally up to each fan to make this new information fit into whatever mythology which most resonates with them. Feel free to let me know what you think or if something else occurs to you.

The next thing I discovered is very connected in my opinion, please make up your own minds. I looked at the label artwork of 'You're Now Entering the Basalt Zone' and it's an Olmec head and I've briefly written about the mystery behind its supposed African facial features here before. This time when I looked at it, again thanks to Google AI, I found that the heads are actually made of basalt rock. Ivan Van Sertima (1935-2009), who wrote They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (1976), was the originator of the theory that Africans had sailed to Mesoamerica around 700 BCE and influenced the Olmec culture. It was a bestseller at the time and could easily have been read by James Stinson and or Gerald Donald. The first chapter is called 'The Secret Route From Guinea' and that I feel is the connection they were trying to make in giving these coordinates and the Olmec head in the label artwork and text. 

We'll never know for sure (better if it remains a mystery) if this book and its thinking was central to  the thinking behind the Drexciya myth (no doubt it was many things, including a fascination with the ocean and marine life) but for me it would historically place Drexciyans as pre-dating the slave trade and pre-historic or even cosmic in origin. 

Despite being a bestseller, the theory of the book was not accepted by scholarship as true and is seen as pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory. However, much like the Drexciyan mythology, I can see it's poetic truth and appeal.

I'll leave you with another James Stinson quote and the strong possibility that there are still plenty more secrets to discover that will also have us "chasing around the world". 

"There are small itty-bitty links between them all (the records) -- and that's the fun part. You have to see what the pattern is to figure it out. It might just be one song but there's a lot going on. It's a lot of fun. This is a fun project, something fun and mysterious. It's a mystery, chasing around the world all the different stuff. Some of these might be hard and tricky to figure out. To us, it's fun. We're humans and humans love mystery - we're very curious creatures. If you don't challenge the intellect of people, they're going to be bored."

-James Stinson to Tim Pratt (Detroit Free Press 2002).

'Roland TR - 909 rhythm composer for your obsolete TR - 808 . Yes , my machine is AOK . If you can help a fellow musician , please contact me immediately . Gerald Donald...'

One of my readers located this classified advert from the May 1989 issue of Keyboard magazine (see pic below). This must be the 909 Gerald Donald eventually sold to Robert Hood. This is a fascinating find and shows he was making music as early as '89 (two years before his self-released Glass Domain 12" EP). Assuming he is a year or so younger than James Stinson, he would have been about nineteen then.

I think it's just as interesting to learn he was reading this magazine, which is full of reviews and articles about the latest music making hardware/software of the time. Essential information for him, James Stinson and no doubt many more Detroit producers to help them learn their craft. I found a full PDF scan of the issue from March 1989 and it's well worth a look and gives a great insight to the times.