labelmates dream of ancient aliens and space invaders, Erika’s imagination is more science than fiction. 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. (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.

(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. 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. worldview, which prescribes 14-hour raves and audiophile sound quality in search of an escape from the mainframe. Gillen (aka BMG) on the nagging instruction of “ancient voices” who repeatedly urged him to dump his girlfriend and start making techno. She’s among the core personnel of Interdimensional Transmissions, the Detroit record label founded in 1994 by academic-turned-DJ Brendan M. 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.

Anevite Void is Erika Sherman’s second full album, though she’s been active in her local scene for nearly three decades.

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