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Mebrahim Alfa Jr had been sick for a while – he was coughing up blood – but he says he only realized how sick he was when the facial feature on his phone stopped working, because he no longer recognized his face. After visiting her sister in 2022, she was so shocked by her appearance, she was taken to A&E. He had anaphylaxis, a serious and potentially fatal condition: He also had a pulmonary embolism that caused his lungs to fill with blood. “I thought: Oh my God, that’s what killed it Andy Weatherall,” he says today.” Like Weatherall’s predecessor, Alfa Jr is a veteran of British rave culture. Oh.”
Treatment for embolism, he was sent home, but he does not feel well. A weekend later, a second pulmonary embolism was found in his other lung. The weekend after that, he suffered a heart attack. Then he had another heart attack. When he got home, he found that “everything didn’t go well, even the water is swelling my face,” he says. “You don’t know what to eat, so I just had pasta and lettuce leaves for three months, not seeing anyone. I just locked myself in a room, and my friend would bring me pasta and lettuce leaves. I kept going out to the doctors. Any kind of life, seeing other people, was missing. It was true.”
Locked in the house, he began making music furiously, “500 tracks” in all, “almost like making a diary”. These songs are very different from the hard techno that made him a popular item among underground producers in the late 90s and early 00s – followed by Cristian Vogel, Operation and Regis, among others – or the two albums he released recently on the prestigious German label Mille Plateaux. The 12 songs that have just been released as an album, Infinite Black Inside, seem to exist in their own unpredictable places: sometimes they are jazzy and abstract, sometimes they are heavy and beat, sometimes they are meditative and sad, sometimes they are very disturbing. “I think once I accepted the fact that I might not be able to live, the walls came down,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never really made music, but I feel like I’ve found a home in my head, in a way.”
“Strict doctors” mean that his life is a little less complicated now – I meet him in a dining room near his home in Hove – although it involves “a lot of medication, sometimes four or five times a week. With socializing, I have to plan ahead: there’s a price to pay to relax later.”
Even before he made the album after suffering from a serious illness, Alfa had an amazing career. The son of a Nigerian soldier, who rose to power under successive dictatorships and died in 2000, he was brought up in Chichester by guardians he described as “middle England, old … Hetty Wainthropp, Midsomer Murders”. His mother shows up every now and then during the school holidays and takes him back to Nigeria or LA. “She was a very young girl, supported by an unlimited pot of money from my father, her life was traveling all over the world,” she says: she can remember a trip to Lagos where an armed guard stood at the door of every room she was in, and a trip to LA that “was supposed to be for a few weeks and ended up being six months, where my guards harassed me. It was always difficult. Because that’s what happens with people like that. But when you live, you don’t know the difference.”
In Chichester, his friends are more into indie music, but he was drawn to techno, especially the sound of Detroit, which he heard on Kiss FM. “In Chichester, I was the only black child of a very similar culture. I loved science fiction, William Gibson, Neuromancer; I think I can relate more to the black people who liked Star Trek more than hip-hop or gangsta rap at that time. Detroit seemed like this city where black people could express themselves under the most terrible conditions without having any rest. ” He laughs. “I don’t think I lived into my 40s to know that.”
He started making his own music when he was about 20 years old, sending a tape to the famous Kiss FM DJ Colin Dale: to his surprise, Dale played his song. From there, he immersed himself in Brighton’s underground techno scene. At the time, the city was home to Luke Slater, Dave Clarke and Cristian Vogel: the latter released his first EP, none-more-techno called Methods of Signal Analysis, on his Mosquito label. It was a series of singles that included dance A-sides and broadsides that showcased Alfa’s love for Steve Reich and John Cage. He started going to Germany every weekend, carrying a lot of equipment to show the show that insisted on changing every week, and started his name, Automatic.
On the surface, everything seemed to be going well. But life was chaotic. His girlfriend had unexpectedly become pregnant: she was still young, struggling to cope with a new baby and the financial difficulties of a sponsor. At first he worked in a factory to earn a living, but as his career grew, he decided to focus on music. “My gigs are organized by myself, like: ‘Hi, my name is Ibi, I’ve made some records that you might have heard.’ Flying to Europe with two suitcases full of synths, no cell phone, hoping someone would be there to pick me up. You know, it’s one thing to be the only Black person among the people you know, but if you’re in the middle of the Czech Republic and you’re the only Black person and the existence of your whole family depends on you going home with that money, it’s very dangerous.
In the end, everything fell apart. His relationship ended, his elderly guardians died, he lost contact with his mother and his musical instruments were destroyed in a house fire. He moved to London, stopped making music and entered a life of crime: he ended up serving two and a half years in Pentonville for drug charges. It was strange, he says, but prison rekindled his interest in making music: sometimes he would pick up Wire magazine, read about the latest developments in electronica and try to figure out what sounds like it. “It’s hard to explain it without sounding really strange, but I was like I made a small studio in my head. I had the sounds in my mind, and how I thought the sequence would look like Midi data: I actually had a nice sound. It kept me good, really, because in chokey, you live in one minute.”
Alfa Jr describes prison as “probably the most dangerous social situation you can live in. People get hurt a lot in the end, you know? One of my friends in prison quietly spits out his antipsychotics every evening: you sleep with your eyes open and he’s standing over you. That’s when I found all kinds of music, and I realize it. It wasn’t important to me, it was…
When he was released, Alfa had £50 in his pocket: on his way home, he saw an old laptop for £40 in a pawnbroker and bought it. He posted the first new song he made on SoundCloud: the Berlin group Black Catalog contacted him and asked him to release it. “I thought: yeah, dude, keep playing music. Maybe you don’t have a lot of gear now, but 10, 15 years ago you would have. make yourself angry to use this computer, just do it very well. “
Ali, with two albums he produced for Mille Plateaux – it is said that the total production cost of the first one was £50 – and now Infinite Black Inside. A lot of medicine and always the appointment of a doctor, he seems to be optimistic about the future: talking about more albums, starting his records again, and including many live instruments in his words, which he could not see in the days when he was an “unacceptable” techno purist. “It’s not surprising, but I was surprised by it,” he says of his resume. “Before, with music, I was always trying to get to the middle of the game, but now I enjoy and appreciate the beauty and structure of it.
