Sherard Ingram, better known as DJ Stingray 313, has spent over three decades refining electro into a force resistant to dilution. A Detroit native, he has taken electro's fast, uncompromising, machine-driven blueprint and accelerated it into a future where precision is non-negotiable. Whether in the studio, behind the decks, or through his label, he is a key architect of electro’s enduring militancy. On March 7, DJ Stingray 313 takes the helm at Control Club, bringing his high-voltage vision to the Bucharest dancefloor.
DJ Stingray 313's earliest recorded forays came in the mid-1980s under the alias Nasa, a collaboration with Lou Robinson of Scan 7, resulting in Time to Party and Can’t Stop Now. These initial outings, produced under the mentorship of longtime friend Kenny Dixon Jr. (later known as Moodymann), were raw but pointed toward something stripped of excess. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Ingram’s sound fully took shape in the crucible of Detroit’s underground.
1991 marked the release of Covert Action under his Urban Tribe moniker, featured on Carl Craig’s Planet E Communications as part of the landmark Equinox compilation. The track’s dystopian aesthetic became a defining moment for electro’s second wave—tense, unrelenting, and intensely mechanized. In 1998, Urban Tribe expanded into a collective, with Craig, Anthony “Shake” Shakir, and Moodymann joining Ingram for the release of The Collapse of Modern Culture on James Lavelle’s Mo’Wax. The album successfully reconfigured Detroit’s rigid rhythmic structures into something looser yet no less cerebral.
The most decisive shift in Ingram’s career came in the late 1990s when he was invited into the world of Drexciya, the legendary electro duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. Absorbing their Afrofuturist mythos, he quickly became their official tour DJ, earning the name DJ Stingray from Stinson and Donald themselves. His first link to Drexciya on a record appeared in 2001 on Clone Records’ Sunday Night Live at the Laptop Café, a split 12” with Stinson’s The Other People Place. When Stinson passed in 2002, Ingram took on the name DJ Stingray 313, a homage to Drexciya’s aquatic lore and the area code of his own Detroit lineage.
Unlike many Detroit artists of his generation who tempered their sound for broader appeal, DJ Stingray 313 remained defiantly committed to electro’s brutalist architecture. His blistering, airtight, and unpredictable DJ sets are built for only the most locked-in dance floors. His productions share the same sensibility, churning through themes of technology, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and cybernetic warfare, mapping out the intersection of human autonomy and machine logic.
Records like F.T.N.W.O., Aqua Team, the Misinformation Campaign EP, and Electronic Countermeasures simulate a world of controlled chaos, their high-speed rhythms and distorted synths capturing the feeling of acceleration toward an uncertain digital future. His music has also found homes on Mahogani Music, Rephlex, Tresor, and Unknown To The Unknown, among others. In 2024, his latest Tresor release, INDUSTRY 4.0, further examined the convergence of automation, artificial intelligence, and labor into a meditation on technology’s influence over human agency.
Alongside his original productions, DJ Stingray 313 has curated mix compilations that reflect his DJ sets' relentless, high-tempo ethos. His 2017 release, Kern Vol. 4 (Tresor Records), is a defining mix that stitches classic and contemporary electro, featuring tracks from Dopplereffekt, Gesloten Circle, Silent Servant, and NRSB-11 (his collaboration with Gerald Donald). Around the same time, his live DJ mix at fabric captured a sweat-drenched whirlwind of deep electro, techno, and bass executed with machine-like precision.
Masked in his signature balaclava, DJ Stingray 313 is now one of the most sought-after performers in the world. Over the years, he has delivered his patented controlled chaos at the likes of Berghain, Tresor, Bassiani, Berlin Atonal, Glastonbury, Dekmantel, Movement, Sonar, and Dimensions, leaving dancers battered and entranced in equal measure.
At a time when many look backwards, DJ Stingray 313 continues to push forward, stripping electro of nostalgia and refining it into something lethal. His music is about resistance, speed, and survival. His DJ sets are blueprints for disruption. While others have softened, DJ Stingray 313 has only become more radical, a cybernetic sentinel guarding electro’s most vital edge as it propels into an increasingly unstable future.
