Without wishing to spoil one of the best science fiction movies of the 1970s—you’ve had long enough to watch it, surely—there’s a crushing scene in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running that envisions a biome floating through deep space, its greenery sustained in perpetuity by a loyal robot. This off-world equilibrium can run and run, is the idea, at least until the next civilization chances upon it. The closed-system techno of Detroit authority Erika operates on the same principle.
Anevite Void is Erika Sherman’s second full album, though she’s been active in her local scene for nearly three decades. Now known as both a DJ and live act, Sherman was drafted into electro duo Ectomorph in the late ’90s to replace Drexciya’s Gerald Donald. She’s among the core personnel of Interdimensional Transmissions, the Detroit record label founded in 1994 by academic-turned-DJ Brendan M. Gillen (aka BMG) on the nagging instruction of “ancient voices” who repeatedly urged him to dump his girlfriend and start making techno.
There’s a definite wigginess to the I.T. worldview, which prescribes 14-hour raves and audiophile sound quality in search of an escape from the mainframe. Some artists on the label have taken their music in especially idiosyncratic directions: Alpha 606’s cranked-up take on electro’s Cuban roots; the crusty cassette house of I.B.M. (an alias of Hieroglyphic Being); I-F’s schlocky and formative “Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass.” Erika’s music is more like the label’s neutral atomic core, an experiment in technoid equilibrium built from a space station’s worth of gear. (The Anevite Void liner notes include a thank you to “my closest friends and family”: 27 bits of kit from Roland, genoQs, Moog, et al.) With all that technology at her disposal you might expect the results to feel dense and overworked, but Anevite Void is rather sparsely populated. There’s a concept, of course: the “irregular life cycles” of a strange planet—half rock desert, half deep forest—orbited by three suns, with each track describing what she calls the “acts of survival of the biomes.” Perhaps a drone robot is lurking with a battered watering can, but certainly there’s no humanoid life.
If Sherman’s I.T. labelmates dream of ancient aliens and space invaders, Erika’s imagination is more science than fiction. Sometimes her systems are barely breathing, all rhythm reduced to the ticking of vital signs, like a bank of hospital monitors hooked up to a meditating monk. After the obligatory ambient opening track, “Opal Haze” enters on a ripple of hi-tech jazz in the Detroit fashion: tight blank kicks, a squelch of bass notes, fizzling hats. “Desert Red” rolls forth on a bottled-up bassline as a billion synapses blink on and off. On “Anion,” the gaseous remains of ’90s IDM evaporate on contact.
Sherman’s music can come across as purist to the point of austerity, but her own tastes are omnivorous, thanks in part to a past life as a programmer on student station WCBN-FM. (Many Detroiters will credit the city’s history of adventurous freeform radio for their eclectic listening habits.) While the I.T. crew’s No Way Back parties—the stuff of legend for scene outsiders—have burnished her reputation as a master selector of the dark and hypnotic, in her studio the dancefloor feels eons away. Gillen has compared her tracks to “[Charles] Darwin’s field drawings, very free and organic.” Interviewed in 2015, Sherman explained that she usually listens to the sounds around her at home—“echoing car stereos, the weather, a toilet flushing, heels on tile”—and sometimes blocks them out with drum machines and synthesizers.
At moments, especially when the analog gear is most present, like the wobbly synths of “Tomorrow’s Fires,” you could almost imagine no time had passed since this type of ultra-cool, ultra-clean techno first appeared on Detroit labels like Planet E. But take a small leap and imagine electro not so much as a genre, built from this type of kick or that type of snare, but as a dimension, an endless plane of contemplation. If you want it, it’s always there, this platonic zone of endlessly pulsating forms, drifting on a distant lifeworld, waiting for someone to pick up the signal.
