On their first album in five years, Drexciya’s Gerald Donald and his long-time collaborator To-Nhan allow their habitually chilly electro to thaw a little, unexpectedly making way for a glimmer of human emotion.
If it weren’t for the instant appeal of his music, Gerald Donald’s sprawling discography and penchant for aliases might obscure the fact that he’s been making peerless techno and electro for more than 30 years. His work with the late James Stinson as conceptual electro superduo Drexcyia blew minds and subwoofers. As Arpanet, he and Stinson (and then he alone) flipped Kraftwerk’s maybe-ironic Euro-techno utopianism for a maybe-cynical industrial music for virtual workplaces. His Der Zyklus productions bumped and bounced with the best of Detroit funk. The ripples created by a series of albums under his own name in the early 2000s deserve wider circles of listeners, as do his early, proggy workouts as L.A.M. This brutal world might not deserve a comprehensive Collected Works box set, but I sure hope we get one.
And then there’s Dopplereffekt, his duo (as Rudolf Klorzeiger, another alias) with To-Nhan, aka Michaela To-Nhan Bertel. Over the decades, the pair have undertaken electronic investigations of sex, fascism, capitalism, and other human entanglements, producing increasingly chilly output. Neurotelepathy thaws things to a kind of body temperature: It won’t break a sweat, but its cinematic swoon and crisp precision break the Dopplereffekt mold. What spills out sounds an awful lot like human emotion.
A concept album about a machine’s ability to decipher a subject’s thoughts, Neurotelepathy switches on the mechanics that come standard in much of Donald’s work. Then things get real. “Neural Impulse Actuator - Mirror Neuron” grounds itself in peppy electro, impeccably made, with a bassline that establishes unexpected grids. What appear to be recognizably human vocals swerve in, tangled with synth-y zigzags. They almost destabilize the whole endeavor, as if to say, it’s chaotic out there. As if they read my mind.
“Visual Cortex” and “Optogenetics” carry on the Carpenter-esque arpeggiated menace Donald excels in, but swap out the paranoia for stretches of panoramic wonder at what data can do. Opener “Epigenetic Modulation,” an unexpected collaboration with Kranky ambient explorer Christina Vantzou, establishes the philosophical framework. An announcer labels the audio transmission “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” the same way Curtis McClain anointed Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body” as “house music all night long,” the way SOPHIE invoked the immaterial. What you do, and what’s done to you, becomes who people can be. It might not take a mind-reader to suppose that, for someone with a legacy like Donald’s, this possibility is a blessing and a curse. And indeed, after this clear statement of intent, Neurotelepathy only gets squishier. Closer “EEG” is fleshiness made audible, like Cronenberg in its mess and revelation, and light years from Donald’s usual scientific method—dark years, maybe.
There’s pleasure, too. “Neuroplasticity” and “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” show off Donald’s encyclopedic collection of hi-hats and kicks, but they also iterate pop, the best empathy machine humans have ever built. Mostly, though, the buzz offsets the song cycle at the album’s center: a trio (“Cerebral Data Download to 2100 AD,” “Cerebral to Cerebral Interface,” and “Cerebral - AI Entanglement”) that opens with twinkles of melody, succumbs to a targeted downpour of bass, then reveals a shifting world with clicks that swipe as scythes through blooming fields of data. By the end, the only sounds are smoke. The achievement is a reversal: Now we’re telling machines what they think, projecting apocalypse onto our tools. The future is bleak, and we’re not even ready for Donald’s present.
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