In last month’s slackjackerz broadcast I did a 1h special on Gerald Donald and James Stinson, the creators of Drexciya, Dopplereffekt, Transllusion, Der Zyklus, Arpanet, Japanese Telecom, and many more cool projects.
While James Stinson died of heart problems in 2002, there have recently been some posthumous releases, one from a recovered DAT tape of Jack People’s Laptop CafĂ© that has previously been assumed to be lost. The EP has been released on Clone’s sublabel Clone Aqualung Series which is specifically dedicated to the work of Gerald Donald and James Stinson. The release met with some harsh and undeserved criticism on its discogs page, but nevertheless has a solid rating >4.5/5.
2018 also saw a new Transllusion release, A Moment Of Insanity, which unfortunately I didn’t cover in my DJ-Mix because I couldn’t get my hands on it in time. As a compensation I embed a youtube clip here:
Further, there are new very good remasters of the Drexciya classics Wavejumper and Black Sea, which I both feature in my mix.
Another reason to make the special was the mainstream attention that afrofuturism and black science fiction gathered in 2018 with the release of Marvel’s Black Panther. To accentuate the afrofuturist content I originally planned to play Shifted Phases’ Crossing the Sun-Ra Nebula, an homage to space jazz artist Sun Ra, who innovated the afrofuturist genre through his cult movie Space Is The Place.
Unfortunately, I somehow forgot to play this crucial track. Maybe the next time!
While I don’t mind Black Panther, what I really would want to see is a tech noir cyberpunk flic about Drexciyan myths, drawn by Jean Giraud’s Moebius persona and with the soundtrack naturally coming from Drexciya themselves. Too bad it’s not possible anymore. All I can offer is this DJ-Mix from mixcloud: