Neptune’s Lair cover

Neptune’s Lair

Drexciya

Released

1999

Detroit production duo Drexciya’s debut album followed a series of highly influential 12" releases and came at the end of a decade they’d spent creating a small but perfectly formed electro/techno discography. Neptune’s Lair has 21 tracks but 9 of them are sub-3 minutes long, creating an album that continually delivers fresh sounds and new ideas. The music is broad-ranging, taking in 4/4 techno slammers, machine-tooled synthetic funk, soundtrack-esque pieces and all sorts of angular, abstract electronics. Ahead of its time, it’s an album that remains extremely influential in electronic music.

The Detroit-based techno-electro duo Gerald Donald and James Stinson, collectively known as Drexciya, concocted a nautical backstory to their releases worthy of anything from Namor the Sub-Mariner: an underwater colony, Drexciya, was populated by the unborn progeny of African women thrown overboard during the Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage. But the instrumental music of their Neptune’s Lair debut — synthy, propulsive, energetic — never sounded anything short of celebratory.