The concept of time is a tricky one when you live at the bottom of the sea. Is it day? Is it night? Who knows, it’s too dark to tell. Certainly it’s never been much past 1991 in Drexciya‘s Jules Verne-style sub-aquatic fantasy world, the Atlantis-like myth this amorphous Detroit electro outfit perpetuate in a bid to avoid press duty and appear slightly mysterious.
Like ideological and musical affiliates Underground Resistance, Drexciya maintain a strict code of “staying low and staying true”; few interviews, badly drawn pictures of fish and a handful of records during the last eight years means they’re almost by right afforded the prefix of ‘legendary’. And while their part in the creation of sleek, deep bleep techno shouldn’t be overlooked, on second album ‘Neptune’s Lair‘, it seems Drexciya really have had difficulty grasping reality.
Defiantly unaffected by recent progress in electronic music, Drexciya stick to the supple electro-funk and brittle techno methods of old, diluting their sound and rarely taking it forward. There are nods to – wow – Kraftwerk (‘Surface Terrestrial Colonization‘) and the occasional bright moment (‘Fusion Flats‘), but too many inoffensive, half-finished sketches and tired ideas quickly date ‘Neptune’s Lair‘, and finds the Drexciyans, professionally speaking, treading water.