In song, the ocean is often—usually?—a metaphor. It can represent a bunch of things: distance, eternity, fathomless emotion. But metaphor is also a luxury, one that many people—reduced by circumstance to basic survival, robbed of symbolic capital, denied the power of their own stories—can’t afford.
A new record by the Brooklyn producer Lamin Fofana drives that point home—surprisingly, perhaps, given that the release in question is all-instrumental and all-electronic; not necessarily the best format, you might think, for tackling these kinds of issues. But there’s a precedent for this.
The Detroit electro duo Drexciya used the ocean as a springboard (and while we’re talking about metaphors, I’m sorry for mixing them there) for one of the most elaborate conceptual frameworks that electronic music has known. For the millions of enslaved Africans who did not survive the Middle Passage, the ocean was a graveyard. Yet Drexciya managed to take this genocidal history and spin it into the basis for an experiment in Afro-futurist science fiction. In their musical (re)telling, the unborn children of pregnant women who were thrown overboard did not perish; they adapted and survived. These Drexciyans, as this ambitious mutant species was known, flourished underwater, breathing through gills and utilizing webbed appendages, battling the forces of human greed atop their Wavejumpers.
The subversive power of Drexciya’s invented world was underscored by the fact that during their run, the group granted no interviews and kept its members’ identities a closely guarded secret. (Drexciya’s lineup only became known after the death of James Stinson, a member of Detroit’s Underground Resistance crew, in 2002; his partner in the duo, Gerald Donald, continues to make music under a variety of aliases.) The Drexciyan mythology spoke for itself; it was all you needed to know, and, fitting its subject, it contained rage and sadness and fierce intelligence and blinding wit. Theirs was a different kind of protest music: by imagining an alternate outcome to past atrocities, they made the future their battleground. For their weaponry, they turned to technology, both real and imagined. As Kodwo Eshun writes, connecting Drexciya to the Afro-futurist tradition, "Technology generates the process Sun Ra terms an AlterDestiny, a bifurcation in time."
You can hear Drexciya's influence on Another World, Lamin Fofana’s new EP. It's there, faintly, in the aquamarine chords and white-noise foam and snapping electro syncopations of "Lampedusa"; it's even more distinct in the bubbling repetitions and crystalline hi-hats of "Plume (Realist Mix)".
Fofana, who was born and raised in Sierra Leone and Guinea, runs the Sci-Fi & Fantasy label—home to, among other things, Lotic's first releases. His own work is part of a dialogue between techno, as it's broadly understood, and more abstracted forms. With the Another World EP, he attempts to link techno back to the real world, to bridge aesthetics with socio-economics, with ocean currents, with stale bread and dirty water. It's right there in the subtitle of the third track: "(Realist Mix)".
American listeners may recognize the name "Lampedusa" without knowing why; it's Italy's southernmost island, just 70 miles away from Tunisia, and one of the main entry points for migrants and refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia attempting to enter Europe by sea.
You might say that Lampedusa is a beacon, then—but migrants and refugees don’t often have the option of choosing their metaphors. In 2013, a Libyan ship carrying 500 African migrants burned and sank off the coast of the island, killing more than 360. (The BBC later reported that many of those same migrants were raped and tortured by their traffickers before boarding.) For them, Lampedusa was a gravestone. For those who make it to shore and are thrown into camps where they await processing or deportation, Lampedusa is a prison, a locked gate, a dead end.
In his notes accompanying the release, Fofana writes:
With this piece, I want to convey a certain mood, a feeling of being adrift at sea somewhere between catastrophe and paradise. We live in a complex world today, and depending on the lens you look through, the possible futures shift. The future can look dim and uncertain - because at the present things are not going so well for the people of planet earth.
I was thinking of the thousands of African migrants braving winter storms and twenty foot waves in overcrowded rickety vessels crossing the Mediterranean Sea and hoping to reach Europe, while European governments are deliberately letting them drown or locking them up to deter others from coming. It’s absolutely depressing and shameful what's going on.
The United Nations estimates that more than 137,000 people, mostly refugees fleeing "war, conflict, or persecution," have crossed the Mediterranean in order to enter Europe in the first six months of 2015. More than 1200 people are estimated to have drowned. Calais, France, is another front in the war on human dignity; 10 people have died there since the beginning of June. In the meantime, European leaders squabble over who bears responsibility for sheltering asylum seekers, a cynical game of pass the buck.
So for many of us, then, Lampedusa is a different kind of symbol—for the political and moral failure of privileged inhabitants of Europe and the UK, for our seeming inability to act or to protect and welcome asylum seekers and struggling migrants.
To bring it back to Fofana’s record: The music is good, very good, particularly "Plume (Realist Mix)". It's everything techno should be: urgent, inventive, hypnotic. It's fair to ask, of course, how music, particularly instrumental electronic music, can adequately address a crisis of this magnitude. And perhaps the short answer is that it can't. You won't be able to discern what "Plume (Realist Mix)" is about if you hear it in a club.
That doesn’t mean we stop trying. That's one of the reasons we have the Internet in the first place, after all—to share ideas, to offer context, to cut to the chase. Once upon a time, we did this with record sleeves and liner notes and insert sheets. (I will always remember the experience of buying Bronski Beat's Age of Consent in 1984, at age 13, and learning from its fold-out cassette cover how British age-of-consent laws discriminated against LGBT youth. I'd never thought about anything like that before, and it marked a turning point in my own understanding of human rights.) It’s to Fofana’s credit that he’s using techno as a platform to talk about the refugee crisis; it is a reminder that techno can be about something beyond formalism, beyond pleasure, beyond its own history.
In many ways, the EP's title track might be its most powerful. In "Another World", Fofana sets aside the beats and concentrates entirely on a digital evocation of the ocean: four solid minutes of gurgle and swirl. Tiny, bubbling arpeggios rise and fall, creating the illusion of rolling waves crested with seafoam; towards the end, it morphs into what sounds like a field recording of the tide. As far as representation goes, there's nothing metaphorical about it. Here it is, he seems to be saying; this is it. It's not a whale-road, not a wine-dark sea, just an expressionless play of frequency designed to evoke a force unfathomably vast. The title, "Another World", is woefully ironic. Drexciya dreamed up another world for their survivor protagonists, but nothing like that awaits the victims of the Mediterranean migration. For too many people, the sounds evoked on "Another World" are simply the last thing they'll ever hear.