{"id":723185,"date":"2026-06-08T14:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T14:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/723185\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T14:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T14:13:08","slug":"in-prison-i-made-a-little-studio-in-my-head-it-kept-me-sane-ibrahim-alfa-jr-british-technos-great-survivor-dance-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/723185\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018In prison, I made a little studio in my head. It kept me sane\u2019: Ibrahim Alfa Jr, British techno\u2019s great survivor | Dance music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ibrahim Alfa Jr had been feeling unwell for a while \u2013 he\u2019d been coughing up blood \u2013 but he says he only realised how ill he was when the facial recognition on his phone stopped working, because it could no longer recognise his face. When he went to visit his sister in 2022, she was so shocked by his appearance, she took him straight to A&E. He was suffering from anaphylaxis, a severe and potentially fatal allergic reaction: moreover, he had a pulmonary embolism that was causing his lung to fill up with blood. \u201cI thought: oh my God, that\u2019s literally what killed Andy Weatherall,<\/a>\u201d he says today. Like Weatherall once was, Alfa Jr is a veteran star of British rave culture. \u201cSo, like, wow.\u201d<\/p>\n

The embolism treated, he was sent home, but still wasn\u2019t feeling right. The weekend after, a second pulmonary embolism was found on his other lung. The weekend after that, he had a heart attack. Then he had a second heart attack. Returning home, he discovered he\u2019d become \u201callergic to everything. Even water was swelling my face,\u201d he says. \u201cYou just don\u2019t know what you can eat, so I just lived on porridge and lettuce leaves for three months, and didn\u2019t see anybody. I just locked myself in a room, and a friend would bring me porridge and lettuce leaves. I only went out to go to the doctors. Any type of social life, of seeing other humans just disappeared. It was that visceral.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trapped at home, he started making music at a furious rate, \u201cat least 500 tracks\u201d in total, \u201calmost like making an audio diary\u201d. These tracks are noticeably different either to the tough techno that made him something of a connoisseur\u2019s choice among underground producers in the late 90s and early 00s \u2013 feted by Cristian Vogel, Surgeon and Regis, among others \u2013 or the two albums he released more recently on esteemed German label Mille Plateaux. The 12 tracks that have just been released as an album, Infinite Black Inside, seem to exist in their own undefinable space: sometimes jazz-influenced and abstract, sometimes heavy and beat-driven, sometimes meditative and becalmed, sometimes deeply unsettling. \u201cI think that once I accepted the fact that I might not live, the walls sort of came down,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, I\u2019ve never really made regular music anyway, but I feel I\u2019ve found a home in my head now, in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

A \u201creally rigid medical regime\u201d means his life is a little less curtailed now \u2013 I meet him in a cafe not far from his home in Hove \u2013 although it still involves \u201ca vast amount of medications, sometimes four or five doctor\u2019s appointments a week. With social interactions, I have to plan ahead: there\u2019s a price to pay of having a rest afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even before making an album after a life-threatening illness, Alfa had an extraordinary career. The son of a Nigerian air marshal, who gained power under successive military dictatorships and died in 2000, he was brought up in Chichester by guardians he describes as \u201cproper middle England, elderly \u2026 Hetty Wainthropp, Midsomer Murders\u201d. His mother would occasionally appear during school holidays and whisk him back to Nigeria or to LA. \u201cShe was a very young woman, enabled with a bottomless pot of my dad\u2019s money, her life was just flitting around the world,\u201d he says: he can recall a trip to Lagos where an armed guard was permanently stationed at the door of whatever room he was in, and a visit to LA that was \u201csupposed to be for a couple of weeks and ended up lasting six months. It must have been traumatic for my guardians, they didn\u2019t know where the fuck I was. It was difficult. I was always thinking \u2018is my dad going to get assassinated?\u2019 Because that\u2019s what happens with people like that. But when you\u2019re living it, you don\u2019t know any different.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Chichester, his friends mostly liked indie music, but he was drawn to techno, particularly the sound of Detroit, which he\u2019d heard on Kiss FM. \u201cIn Chichester, I was the only Black kid in a really homogeneous culture. I liked science fiction, William Gibson, Neuromancer; I think I could relate more to Black people that liked Star Trek more than hip-hop or gangsta rap at the time. Detroit seemed like this metropolis where Black people could express themselves under the most extreme conditions and thrive without having to compromise themselves.\u201d He laughs. \u201cI don\u2019t think it was until I was in my 40s that I really took stock of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ibrahim Alfa Jr performing in his youth. Photograph: Ibrahim Alfa Jr<\/p>\n

He started making his own tracks in his late teens, sending a tape to Kiss FM\u2019s legendary techno DJ Colin Dale: to his astonishment, Dale played a track on his show. From there, he embedded himself in Brighton\u2019s underground techno scene. At the time, the city was home to Luke Slater, Dave Clarke and Cristian Vogel: the latter released his debut EP, the none-more-techno titled Methods of Signal Analysis, on his Mosquito label. It was the first of a succession of singles that paired face-melting dancefloor A-sides with more spacious and thoughtful tracks that betrayed Alfa\u2019s love of Steve Reich and John Cage. He started travelling to Germany every weekend, carting a huge amount of equipment with him to perform a live show that he insisted on changing every week, and founded his own label, Automatic.<\/p>\n

On the surface, everything appeared to be going swimmingly. Behind the scenes, life was chaotic. His girlfriend had unexpectedly become pregnant: they were still just teenagers, struggling to cope with a new baby and the attendant financial pressures. Initially, he worked in a factory to make ends meet, but as his career grew, opted to focus on music. \u201cMy gigs were organised by myself, like: \u2018Hi, my name\u2019s Ibi, I made some records you might have heard.\u2019 Flying to Europe with two suitcases full of synths, didn\u2019t have a mobile phone, hoping someone would be there to pick me up. You know, it\u2019s one thing being the only Black person around people you know, but if you\u2019re in the middle of Czech Republic and you\u2019re the only Black person and your whole family\u2019s existence hinges on you getting home with the money, it\u2019s really nerve-racking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, everything fell apart. His relationship broke up, his elderly guardians died, he lost what contact he had with his mother and his musical equipment was destroyed in a house fire. He moved to London, stopped making music and slipped into a life of criminality: he eventually served two and a half years in Pentonville for drug offences. It was weird, he says, but prison reawakened his interest in making music: he would sometimes get hold of a copy of the Wire magazine, read about the latest developments in electronica and try to imagine what they sounded like. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to explain it without sounding really strange, but I kind of made a little studio in my head. I had sounds in my mind\u2019s eye, but also how I presumed the sequences would appear as Midi data: I literally had tracks visualised. It kind of kept me sane, really, because in chokey, you\u2019re living absolutely in the minute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ibrahim Alfa Jr. Photograph: James Pearson-Howes<\/p>\n

Alfa Jr describes prison as \u201cprobably the most dangerous societal situation you\u2019re ever going to be in. People get really badly hurt over half a roll-up, you know? One my cellmates was quietly spitting out his antipsychosis medication every evening: you\u2019d go to sleep and then open your eyes and he\u2019d be standing over you. That was the point where I sort of realised, whatever happens, you can\u2019t get yourself in this situation again. Music became something that wasn\u2019t just important to me, it was \u2026 if you can get out of this situation you\u2019re never going to not do music again, because it was so viscerally brought home to me that none of these people really have a way to express themselves and that\u2019s probably a massive driving force behind their behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he was released, Alfa had \u00a350 in his pocket: en route home, he saw an old laptop for \u00a340 in a pawnbrokers and bought it. He posted the first new track he\u2019d made on it to SoundCloud: the Berlin label Black Catalogue contacted him asking to release it. \u201cI thought: yeah, dude, keep doing the music. You might not have much kit at the moment, but 10, 15 years ago you would have been pissing yourself to be able to use this computer, so just make the fucking best of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has, with the two albums he made for Mille Plateaux \u2013 he says the total cost of making the first was \u00a350 \u2013 and now Infinite Black Inside. An excess of medication and constant doctor\u2019s appointments notwithstanding, he seems optimistic about the future: talking about more albums, starting his own label again, and incorporating more live instruments into his sound, something he would never have countenanced in the days when he was an \u201cinsufferable\u201d techno purist. \u201cIt\u2019s such a cliche, but I\u2019m kind of smugly amazed about it,\u201d he says of his resurgence. \u201cBefore, with music, I was always trying to get to the centre of the maze, but now I\u2019m just happy appreciating its beauty and how it\u2019s constructed. And yeah, I just love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Infinite Black Inside is out now, via FO<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ibrahim Alfa Jr had been feeling unwell for a while \u2013 he\u2019d been coughing up blood \u2013 but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-723185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}