When Ibrahim Alfa Jr. was released from prison about a decade ago, it was pitch dark out and he didn’t know where to go. The techno producer was prolific in the late ‘90s, coming up in Bristol at the outer orbits of the European techno scene, rolling with the likes of David Moufang (Move D), Cristian Vogel, and Justin Berkovi. But he began dealing drugs after moving to London as a way to stay afloat financially while supporting his daughter and ex-girlfriend. After two-and-a-half years behind bars, he got out on parole, and was determined to stay out.
“I went to my friend’s house in Acton, and thought to myself, ‘God, this is not really a place I need to be,’” he remembers. “But the next day as I was making my way back to my flat I saw an ancient G4 Mac in the window of a second-hand electric shop for 40 quid. I think I probably had 47 quid or something like that. And I thought I’d just buy it. A lot of the music that I recorded on that is now on Bandcamp, and it’s some of the most fun music I’ve made.”
Those recordings from 2010-2013 are indeed fun—and messy. But you can hear the sound of a musician finding his way back into a world of sound. “Ankle Breaker” is a stab at footwork informed by descriptions of the music in the magazine The Wire, while the erratic sampling on tracks like “Golden Dose” and “I can never remember the weather in September” is as hauntological as it is fragmented. Breakbeats scatter against off-kilter, off-key horn meanderings on “Those who trespass against us,” while steel guitar samples slide across a wrong-footed backbeat on “Your House is always home.” Had these tracks been released when they were made, they might have been grouped among the likes of James Ferraro and Daniel Lopatin.
As Alfa tells it, music has been a source of strength for him. “When I’ve had access to the tools, I’ve been making music pretty consistently,” he says. Having put out an impressive amount of vinyl through his labels Automatic and Semi-Automatic, he went back to the digital realm with the netlabel Oyabun Audio in 2013. “I thought [the word] was just simply Japanese for ‘dad,” but I found out later that it’s a little more sinister than that,” he laughs. (Oyabun is a slang term for an organized crime boss in Japan.) “We released a lot of the kind of techno that you might not hear in places the Printworks or something like that. It’s the kind of techno that I played for people when I was doing gigs [in the ‘90s], audiences of 400-500 in Germany predominantly.” But at the time, without access to a stable internet connection, it was tough going. “It was kind of a lot of uploading stuff, telling them look, it’s up there, it’s getting distributed, do your best with it.”
In 2016, Alfa got a call with good news. “One day I got a call, [something along the lines of] ‘We forgot to tell you, but six months ago you were taken off the [Integrated Offender Management] list,” he says. “That has been massive. Not really overcoming the struggle, since that makes it seem like some kind of noble thing. But people need to be absolutely clear: If you are a Black male on the margins in London, it doesn’t matter what type of education you got, it doesn’t matter what type of background you’ve got, that system is made to perpetuate [that struggle].”
2 x Vinyl LP
That same year, Alfa had his biggest break yet. “David [Moufang] emailed me like, ‘Oh, I’m coming up this weekend, I’ve got something for you,’” he says. “And I just assumed it might be one of his new records or something like that.” Instead, Moufang brought an old demo CD that Alfa had recorded for him over a decade ago, one that both of them thought had been lost forever. “He’d gone through his studio in the basement looking for the CD and eventually found it stuffed behind the radiator, where it’d been for about 12 years. The only other copy was on a hard drive which my daughter’s mom promptly deleted after we parted ways,” says Alfa. “In my heart, I always had a feeling it was the most competent music that I’d made back in that time in Brighton.” Moufang ended up releasing it on his Workshop imprint as Hidden in the Leaves, technically Alfa’s debut album.
“I think it was actually my best-selling record,” says Alfa. “And it was kind of reassuring in some sense that if I had just a level-ish playing field and sort of peaceful environment, I could make fairly okay music.” The chaotic environments that Alfa has inhabited were chronicled almost 10 years ago when Joe Muggs sat down with him for Vice, but Alfa’s musical output has only picked up in recent years. “At the moment my main battle is with diabetes,” he says. “Over the last year, I’ve been really, really ill. But I am not a guy that’s gonna lie in bed and fester about my lot.”
He’s true to his word: In 2022, he began a three-album series with Mille Plateaux that outlines the different eras of his sound. “As a child, Mille Plateaux was one of my favorite labels,” he says. “I stumbled across Generation Star Wars by Alec Empire, probably when I was like 14,” he says. Having released a record through its sublabel Force, Inc. back in his teenage Brighton days, Alfa figured he’d try his luck again now that he’d moved back again from London. “I sent it to Achim, a few of the tracks, and he was like, ‘We’ll only do an album.’ I thought, ‘Well, I can probably manage.’”
“Mille Plateaux is generally known for being an experimental label, but what I wanted to do for myself was use it as my space to do three albums, sort of give it my little take on various periods on techno for myself,” he says. “The latest one, Sirius A, was more rooted in a more pure style of techno, like the Black Dog stuff I listened to when I was a kid, and the Drexciya stuff, some Detroit. And the first one, Messier87, was rooted in the kind of live act sound that I would churn out around Europe as a kid with a Commodore Amiga. And then the third one will hopefully be something more hi-tech, more experimental than the other two.”
Fuelling his recent prolific run is a genuine love for sound, despite his health issues. “It reached hypercritical for me about six months ago, and that was when the doctor started calling a lot and saying, ‘Yeah, come to another appointment.’ It’s one of those things that is a life changer,” he says. “If I’ve been having a grueling day, I just spend a lot of time in my head. Sound is my safe place. It’s such pleasure. There’s always something that I want to try. With synthesis it’s infinite. It’s never exactly the same. And that is something that I’ve always found almost magical.”
One thing he’s been trying recently is a software called StarWaves developed by Sinan Bokesoy. “For me, [using] StarWaves was the first time in a long time that a form of sequencing and synthesis was completely alien to me,” he says. “The way of representing [music] that way almost seemed impossible to me. The premise is essentially using light as a medium for the sound rather than vibration.” Video demonstrations do little to demystify the software: Satellites in a 3-D environment shoot lasers across various waveforms represented on 2-D planes, which somehow leads to synthesized sound. Yet Alfa dove deep, using the software to issue two releases for Mille Plateaux under the alias count0. It’s some of his most unsettling music yet, sonic atmospheres as alien as the concepts behind the software.
“Dr. Sinan and I have become pretty close friends since then,” says Alfa. “He keeps me updated with the versions of the applications he makes now.” He’s thankful to everyone who’s helped him recently. “Tobias [von Hofsten] did records for a friend of mine many, many years ago, but I think he got a sort of scent of what was happening so he sent me a whole gift pack of synth modules, et cetera, which was really nice and supportive,” he says. “Mike Paradinas and his wife Lara, they’ve been really, really, really lovely. They put on a gig just at a small club just to support Lara’s album, and they invited me to play as well.”
When it’s too much to get out of bed, however, Alfa still finds ways to fiddle with sound. “Literally three years ago I would’ve probably been ignorant enough to turn my nose up at the potential of an iPad,” he says. “I was the guy that said the whole MP3 thing’s never gonna work! But I found an iPad Pro on the marketplace for 80 pounds about three months after we moved here [to Brighton]. And that’s essentially been a real salvation, because you can just have it on your lap when you’re feeling awful.”
In addition to his already prolific output on Mille Plateaux, Alfa’s started yet another netlabel for his music. “I’ve been playing around with the idea of re-starting my original label. But then around lockdown time, I did quite a lot of life re-assessing, and, to be honest, there was just so much baggage with it that I hadn’t addressed and that I didn’t want to address, and I thought it would be a good thing to start something fresh.” Tsaigumi Records has issued 24 releases so far this year, ranging from the Detroit-esque electro of Bull to the face-melting techno of JAIL HOUSE to the ambient pianism of REGRESSIONS 1\4.
It’s all par for the course for Alfa, who shows no sign of stopping. “Sometimes when I look back, when I was 19-20, some months I’d have like 5 records out, working full-time, and doing most of the home stuff as well. Doing Tsaigumi might appear to be a prolific amount of music in such a short time, but I love music and given the opportunity that is what I always do,” he says. “It’s one of those things even if I was in a cupboard somewhere with no interaction with anybody, I’d probably just be tapping some beats on the wall and be quite happy.”
