DJ Stingray 313’s latest sounds are powered by science, brightly colored synthetic synthesized wavelengths beamed from the future. So don’t sleep.
Forget about generation or age or past accomplishmentss. What has impressed me about Stingray like some of the best of his Detroit colleagues is his natural appetite for the new – out on the (now Berlin) scene, in his DJ sets, and in his productions. (Oh yeah, I guess that thing about constantly swimming sharks is also true, speaking of science.)
That makes these tracks not only refreshing to listen to, but a challenge to producers – to channel that same sharp focus and angle your brain deeply into beginners’ mind.
‘Construction Materials From Organic Waste’ is essential – weird, ominous, a progression of slap-in-the-face percussive surfaces:
Without being overly designed or overly layered, each twist and turn offers a jolt.
It’s hard to put into words, which is why it’s also excellent that Ingram teams up with Iranian-Canadian animator Bahar Noorizadeh. That artist is able to keep up with the acidic shifting sonic timbres by dragging us through some beautifully apocalyptic waste areas of ever-morphing 3D detritus, in the video debut for FACT:
As FACT describes it:
Casting the collapse of Detroit’s automobile industry as contemporary mythology, Noorizadeh explores the car as an unreliable narrator, a fly-on-the-wall of Detroit’s past, a first-hand witness of its’ fall and an unwitting thief of the city’s, and every city’s, uncertain future. “Wretched and utopian, the individual in charge of speed and scale, destiny and destination,” she continues. “The Teslaist dreams of conquest and connectivity expressed in CO2, or in effervescent sweat.” The synthetic textures of her glitched-out visual play out like the A.I. fever dream of a driverless car, as corrupted memories of automated factories spark up against snatches of archive footage of Detroit’s ravers, fragments of the city’s past sliced up as food for some unseen neural net.
We’re very much not supposed to reduce Detroit to ruin porn, but the duo here resynthesize that destruction into something hard to resist. Let’s put it this way – if this work seems optimistic, maybe that’s because it makes such an excellent argument to turn to Stingray and Noorizadeh over faceless machine learning algorithms for guidance.
And as Noorizadeh says, there is a chance to find an escape to something green:
“The derelict factory then is amplified in sound-waves,” writes Noorizadeh. “And now, the new heirs to those techno-hallucinatory assemblages: microorganisms, infectious agents, sunken meadows of seaweed. Oceans rise over mountains of carbon black tires. The car turned techno turns green: The earth wants to become earth again.”
It all fits this moment in Berlin, too, as Detroit artists relocate here and Musk opens his Gigafactory.
Even without knowing Sherard Ingram’s bio, this feels like Drexciya: The Next Generation – now with a faster warp power plant. He wasn’t getting when he told Mixmag in 2017, “I’m trying to not only stay relevant, but define what relevant is.” I mean, yeah – this has the fundamental foundations of electro in the way he helped clarify, but everything has been invigorated with new texture and power.
It also seems like Micron Audio is set to launch into orbit. Stingray’s own imprint has been around in some form since 2011, but this new 12″ – streamable now and shipping physically mid-month – charts new courses for electronic sounds generally. We can also evidently look forward to a reissue of 2012’s seminal outing F.T.N.W.O.
To leave you with a signature DJ set, Stingray’s outing was an unmistakable bright spot in this dark locked-down winter – and takes us back to that beloved Tresor basement. (Tresor isn’t reopened yet, but Stingray did help relaunch Berghain, fittingly.)
It’s also worth revisiting his 2017 mix, also out on the same imprint (called – and I like this name a lot for some reason – the KERN Mix):
Find Micron and the artist here:
https://djstingray313.bandcamp.com/