For the April 2024 episode of Carhartt WIP Radio, "The Myth of Drexciya," writer, cultural theorist, and musician DeForrest Brown Jr. curated a mix spanning Drexciya's discography from 1991 to 2002. Drexciya, the Detroit electronic duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald, built a mythology around an underwater civilization descended from pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard during the Transatlantic crossing, an afrofuturist narrative that Brown Jr. traces back to Detroit techno's origins in his book Assembling a Black Counter Culture. The mix reveals what the artist describes as the sonic fiction of an aquatic invasion of the surface world.
The key visual translates Drexciya's underwater mythology into a physically simulated ocean: a fluid simulation built in Blender, rendered in Cycles with physically based materials so the water surface reflects like metal and bends light realistically. At the bottom of the frame, the Carhartt C is barely visible, only glimpsed through vertical streaks of blue and orange breaking the water's surface.
