‘In prison, I made a little studio in my head. It kept me sane’: Ibrahim Alfa Jr, British techno’s great survivor | Dance music

Ibrahim Alfa Jr had been feeling unwell for a while – he’d been coughing up blood – 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. “I thought: oh my God, that’s literally what killed Andy Weatherall,” he says today. Like Weatherall once was, Alfa Jr is a veteran star of British rave culture. “So, like, wow.”

The embolism treated, he was sent home, but still wasn’t 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’d become “allergic to everything. Even water was swelling my face,” he says. “You just don’t know what you can eat, so I just lived on porridge and lettuce leaves for three months, and didn’t 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.”

Trapped at home, he started making music at a furious rate, “at least 500 tracks” in total, “almost like making an audio diary”. These tracks are noticeably different either to the tough techno that made him something of a connoisseur’s choice among underground producers in the late 90s and early 00s – feted by Cristian Vogel, Surgeon and Regis, among others – 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. “I think that once I accepted the fact that I might not live, the walls sort of came down,” he says. “I mean, I’ve never really made regular music anyway, but I feel I’ve found a home in my head now, in a way.”

A “really rigid medical regime” means his life is a little less curtailed now – I meet him in a cafe not far from his home in Hove – although it still involves “a vast amount of medications, sometimes four or five doctor’s appointments a week. With social interactions, I have to plan ahead: there’s a price to pay of having a rest afterwards.”

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 “proper middle England, elderly … Hetty Wainthropp, Midsomer Murders”. His mother would occasionally appear during school holidays and whisk him back to Nigeria or to LA. “She was a very young woman, enabled with a bottomless pot of my dad’s money, her life was just flitting around the world,” 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 “supposed to be for a couple of weeks and ended up lasting six months. It must have been traumatic for my guardians, they didn’t know where the fuck I was. It was difficult. I was always thinking ‘is my dad going to get assassinated?’ Because that’s what happens with people like that. But when you’re living it, you don’t know any different.”

In Chichester, his friends mostly liked indie music, but he was drawn to techno, particularly the sound of Detroit, which he’d heard on Kiss FM. “In 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.” He laughs. “I don’t think it was until I was in my 40s that I really took stock of that.”

He started making his own tracks in his late teens, sending a tape to Kiss FM’s legendary techno DJ Colin Dale: to his astonishment, Dale played a track on his show. From there, he embedded 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 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’s 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.

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. “My gigs were organised by myself, like: ‘Hi, my name’s Ibi, I made some records you might have heard.’ Flying to Europe with two suitcases full of synths, didn’t have a mobile phone, hoping someone would be there to pick me up. You know, it’s one thing being the only Black person around people you know, but if you’re in the middle of Czech Republic and you’re the only Black person and your whole family’s existence hinges on you getting home with the money, it’s really nerve-racking.”

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. “It’s 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’s 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’re living absolutely in the minute.”

Alfa Jr describes prison as “probably the most dangerous societal situation you’re 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’d go to sleep and then open your eyes and he’d be standing over you. That was the point where I sort of realised, whatever happens, you can’t get yourself in this situation again. Music became something that wasn’t just important to me, it was … if you can get out of this situation you’re 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’s probably a massive driving force behind their behaviour.”

When he was released, Alfa had £50 in his pocket: en route home, he saw an old laptop for £40 in a pawnbrokers and bought it. He posted the first new track he’d made on it to SoundCloud: the Berlin label Black Catalogue contacted him asking to release it. “I 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.”

He has, with the two albums he made for Mille Plateaux – he says the total cost of making the first was £50 – and now Infinite Black Inside. An excess of medication and constant doctor’s 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 “insufferable” techno purist. “It’s such a cliche, but I’m kind of smugly amazed about it,” he says of his resurgence. “Before, with music, I was always trying to get to the centre of the maze, but now I’m just happy appreciating its beauty and how it’s constructed. And yeah, I just love it.”