Permanent Rotation: Courtesy

Permanent Rotation is a series in which producers, DJs, and musicians go deep on the albums that have inspired them.

Danish producer and artist Najaaraq Vestbirk, better known as Courtesy, has spent the past ten years on a creative journey that has traversed many countries and scenes. After graduating from the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014, she co-founded fast techno label Ectotherm in Copenhagen, and then launched Kulør, the label that really put the city’s kaleidoscopic, trance-treated techno on the map.

As Kulør’s boss and an internationally sought-after DJ, Vestbirk helped pioneer the fast techno takeover — now a thriving and increasingly commercial sector of the global scene — but she’s moved away from that sound herself, leaning towards more artistic and experimental endeavours including her just-released sophomore album, intimate yell. A record about friendships, transience, romance and longing informed by poetry, Umberto Eco and youth party culture, it dips into ambient, 2-step, ‘90s IDM and deep house. Here she discusses Drexciya’s Neptune’s Lair. 

In 2014, the first track Vestbirk ever made was an electro track. She says it was very influenced by Drexciya, whom she was listening to “obsessively” at the time. 

“Particularly the way that the snare has this kind of metallic delay on it — that’s really characteristic for Drexciya and a lot of this electro stuff,” she says. It’s unlikely the track will ever see the light of day, but Vestbirk says she will probably release something else that’s equally influenced by the fabled Detroit techno duo. She was introduced to Drexciya over a decade ago through hanging out with people from the Glasgow electro scene who had a strong affinity with the prototypical sounds coming out of Detroit. “This is something I couldn’t really articulate then but what I found so exciting about it is how eclectic the genre is within itself,” she says. “There are so many different and complex drum patterns, there’s so much composition.”

The juxtaposition of sweet, almost camp melodies with rough, raw drum programming was magnetic to Vestbirk, who is drawn to the work of Aphex Twin for the same reason. “Selected Ambient Works is always really high on my list of favourite albums too because he [Aphex Twin] also does this balancing of noise and chaos and distortion mixed with very strong melodic foundations.”

Alongside the music itself, of course, is the Drexciyan myth — among the most prominent and imaginative examples of world-building in the electronic music canon. As inscribed on the sleeve notes to 1997’s The Quest, Drexciya is an imaginary underwater country inhabited by sea-dwelling babies; the spawn of pregnant African women who had been thrown off slave ships to die. 

The expansiveness of and commitment to this lore reminds Vestbirk of a quote from an essay about Édouard Manet written by German art historian Isabelle Graw. “She talks about his paintings as though they never stop at the edges of the canvas,” she says. “And I think that is what’s going on with Drexciya.” She contrasts their afro-futurist speculative fiction and world-building, embedded with cultural critique, with Richard Wagner’s immersive Gesamtkunstwerk stating that Drexciya work is much more interesting. “Their inventiveness from a narrative perspective is just incredible,” Vestbirk says. Out of Drexciya’s discography, she particularly highlights their 1999 classic Neptune’s Lair.

Asked what made her choose this album in particular as her favourite, Vestbirk said she’s been playing “Lost Vessel” in pretty much every set lately, just as she did back in 2014. “I’ll play it until I can’t stand it anymore, because I’m like, if I can hear it again, I’m sure whoever is on the floor can do the same.” Her sets these days are trending towards eclectic, similar to how she played a decade ago, but in reflecting on this period and some of the artists on heavy rotation at that time, Drexciya in particular was one she wanted to embrace again.

At Fold in London the other week, she lined up the “Lost Vessel” and just let it play. “And people are just grooving for it — it’s this very repetitive production actually but very distinct, which is why it works so well on a contemporary dance floor.”

Vestbirk’s stylistic focus as a DJ narrowed as Copenhagen’s fast techno scene quickly gained traction in the mid to late ‘10s. ”Coming out of this particular punk scene in Copenhagen, it was a very exciting genre at the time,” she says. As with many people who are a few years ahead of the curve, her interest in the genre waned as it started to blow up further afield. 

“The curse of a music genre becoming extremely, extremely popular is that the crowd becomes very bro-y, it stops being a dance floor for everyone,” she says. “I started being like, okay, what happens if we drop the tempo a lot? What happens if we play other genres of music? People get really angry. But also these really magical things happen in terms of sexiness and the way people move on the dance floor.”

Kulør is no longer releasing new music, but Vestbirk maintains that she’s proud of everything released on the label, and still admires many fast techno artists. She just felt inclined to swim against the tide when the genre went mainstream. “I personally got to a point where I would walk into the club of the event I was booked for and I would dislike the music that played before me and I disliked the music that played after and I was like, what am I doing? Like, why am I getting up at 3 am in the morning to go and not be inspired?”

Following fra eufori, her debut LP of ambient new age and trance covers last year, Vestbirk’s new record intimate yell is the most comprehensive work she’s produced to date and ostensibly has very little in common with Neptune’s Lair. She’d rather people just listen to it than say too much about it, but is excited to apply what she’s learned to her future projects, and hopes her audience will continue to follow her evolution.

“I will continue to work with longer formats because I find them more interesting in terms of the narratives that I’m interested in, but it’s not for everyone,” says Vestbirk. 

“I will always be grateful for people taking the time to listen to what I do, and I will never take it for granted.”

intimate yell is out now on Vestbirk’s new label, Against Interpretation.