2001 solo album from James Stinson of Drexciya who tragically passed away the following year, Lifestyles… is a mix of down-tempo electronica, electro and techno. It’s futuristic, muted, and subtle with an almost spiritual intensity to the simple, spacious arrangements. Lifestyles… is also highly danceable with the synths, bass and drum machine rhythms locking in tightly, producing a calm yet propulsive listen. An understated Detroit techno classic. 

Lifestyles of the Laptop Café was initially met in 2001 with a mixed response, probably in part due to its anonymity, and partly due to how, in the eyes of some crotchety critics, it “lack[ed] originality.” Yes, the calm 808 patterning is more or less uninterrupted across the entire album, and yes, if any tracks feature vocals, the songs have about the same eight words throughout. But there is something else within the album—a smoke of yearning, a wisp of romantic desperation—that’ll reliably skewer the heart.

Reissued after an online petition that launched in 2017, listeners were re-welcomed to the part-prayer-part-warning in “Let Me Be Me,” the lump-in-throat pangs of “You Said You Want Me,” the horny groans in “Eye Contact.” It’s easy to understand why contemporary audiences find kinship in its despondency - all of it seems so prescient, so pining, so lost. The greatest loss, of course, is that Stinson passed a year to the day of the album’s rerelease, at the hand of the very conflict at its center: “complications of the heart.”