Neptune's Lair

First released by Drexciya's James Stinson and Gerald Donald in 1999 after establishing a cult reputation via EPs and 12"s for UR, Rephlex and Warp, 'Neptune's Lair' was issued by Berlin's Tresor to the acclaim of those in the know. Since James Stinson died in 2002, in subsequent years the album has become widely regarded as their definitive opus - a hugely sophisticated, imaginative piece of Afrofuturist sonic fiction embedded with deeply rooted politics. As the album approaches it's 20th anniversary of release, it still holds the power to utterly transport us to other dimensions, both physically and philosophically. Using the ocean and water as metaphor for deep space, and by extension a site of the unknown, where far-fetched (but not entirely unreasonable) ideas about slave babies thrown overboard on slave-trade routes evolved into futuristic, practically alien beings, Drexciya, much like Sun Ra and his Saturnian roots, formed a whole world unto themselves thru their music and track titles and Abdul Haqq's artwork, creating a sort of holistic gesamtkunstwerk as rich in subtext and noumenal flights of fancy as the most cult comic books or underground animation and cinema.