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By applying philosophical rigour to sonic disruption, the German Mille Plateaux label has become a nexus for resistant musicians such as Oval and Alec Empire. In Frankfurt, Simon Reynolds makes the connections between Teutonic hardcore, post-structuralist theory, digital disobedience and hypermodern jazz
Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany's financial capital and a longstanding
centre of anti-capitalist theory. Most famously, it gave the world the 'Frankfurt School' of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al:
neo-Marxist thinkers who fled Nazism and landed up in Southern California,
where their eyes and ears were affronted by the kitsch outpoutings of
Hollywood's dream-factory. Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered
for its snooty attitude towards popular culture, which it regarded as the 20th
century's opiate-of-the-people, a soul-degrading inferior to High Modernism.
Adorno in particular has achieved a dubious immortality in the Cultural
Studies world, as an Aunt Sally figure ritually bashed by academics as a
prequel to their semiotic readings of 'anti-hegemonic resistance' encoded in
Madonna videos and star trek.
There's no denying Adorno deserves derision for his infamously suspect
comments about the "eunuch-like sound" of jazz, whose secret message was "give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated... and you will be accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you". But in other respects Adorno's critique of pop culture's role as safety valve and social control is not so easily shrugged off. Witness his remarks on the swing-inspired frenzy of the 'jitterbug': "Their ecstasy is without content... It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals." Adorno's verdict on jitterbuggers - "merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence" - could easily be transposed to 90s rave culture, which - from Happy Hardcore to Gabba to Goa trance - is now as rigidly ritualised and conserative as Heavy Metal.
The Frankfurt-based label Mille Plateaux shares something of Adorno's
oppositional attitude to mass culture. For label boss Achim Szepanski,
Germany's rave industry - which dominates the pop mainstream - is so
institutionalised and regulated it verges on the totalitarian. Adorno-style, he
psychoanalyses Ecstasy culture as "a metonymic search for mother-
substitutes - Ecstasy can be your new mommy". Alec Empire, a Mille Plateaux
solo artist and prime mover in his own Berlin-based anti-rave scene Digital
Hardcore, is more blunt: "Rave is dead, it's boring! House is disco and Techno
is Progressive rock." As for Oval, Mille Plateaux's 'star act', when asked about their relationship to Techno, they seem astonished by the question.
"Relationship?!" they reply.
Influenced by post-structuralist theory and named after a gargantuan tract by
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux release deconstruction electronica. Situating their activity both within and against the genre conventions of post-rave styles like Intelligent Techno, House, Jungle and TripHop, Mille Plateaux identify these musics' premature closures and seize their missed opportunities. The results may not offer the easy satisfactions of less ambitious Techno labels/auteurs, but they do constitute the most consistently stimulating catalogue in the post-rave universe.
One January weekend, I met Szepanski at his Frankfurt apartment, which
doubles as HQ for his four labels (Mille Plateaux, Force Inc., Riot Beats and
Force Inc. USA), and is located in the city's sleazy equivalent to King's Cross
(handy for trains, lots of junkies and hookers). Having read his Deleuze-style
press releases (lots of references to "sound-streams" and "disjunctive
singularities") and conducted a theory-dense e-mail conversation, I'm
expecting a rather severe individual. But over the course of the weekend,
Achim reveals some unexpected sides to his character: a dry sense of humour,
a soft spot for plastic pop (he owns CDs by TLC and Kylie Minogue) and an
awesome talent for piss-artistry.
Plagued by a mystery ailment, he spends most of Saturday sipping
homeopathic remedies and complaining that he's too ill to undertake a
planned excursion to see Chicago House DJ and Force Inc. artist Gene Farris
spin at a club in nearby Mainz. At midnight, he decides he's just about up to it.
For the first five hours, Achim's spirits remain low, despite an alcohol intake rate of three beers to my one. But by 6am and beer number 12, Achim is flailing
on the dancefloor, enraptured by Farris's trippy set. Every few minutes, he
accosts someone to blearily proclaim: "Gene Farris is the best House DJ in the world. I don't care, I will tell anyone - Josh Wink, Laurent Garnier - to their face: Farris is the best."
Now aged 35, Szepanski got involved in student politics in the radical, post-1968 climate of the mid-70s. He read Marx, flirted with Maoism, protested about
conditions in the German prison system. Later in the decade he immersed
himself in the post-punk experimentalist scene alongside the likes of DAF,
playing in the Industrial group P16D4. In the 80s he went back to college,
watched the left die and got very depressed, consoling himself with alcohol and
the misanthropic philosophy of Cioran.
Two late 80s breakthroughs pulled him out of the mire: his encounter with the
post-structuralist thought of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, et al, and his
excitement about HipHop and House. While still working on a doctorate about
Foucault, he started the first DJ-orientated record store in Frankfurt and
founded the Blackout label. By the early 90s Szepanski was triping out to
Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, a colossal tome that Foucault hailed as "an introduction to
the non-fascist life".
For Achim, the experience was revelatory and galvanising: Deleuze and
Guattari's theories showed him "that you don't have to be negative or sad if you want to be militant, even if what you fight against is very bad. The Frankfurt School and Marxism has a very linear interpretation of history and a totalising view of society, whereas Deleuze and Guattari say that society is more than just the economy and the state, it's a multitude of sub-systems and local struggles."
From this notion, Achim conceived the strategy of context-based subversion
which informs his labels: hard Techno and House with Force Inc., Electronica
with Mille Plateaux, Jungle with Riot Beats, TripHop with the Electric
Ladyland compilations. These interventions are somewhere between
parody and riposte, demonstrating by deed, not discourse what these genres
could really be like if they lived up to or exceeded their accompanying
'progressive' rhetoric.
Founded in 1991, Force Inc. was initially influenced by Detroit renegades
Underground Resistance; not just sonically, but by "their whole anti-corporate, anti-commodification of dance stance". In its first year, Force Inc.'s neo-Detroit/nouveau Acid sound had a lot of impact. At the same time, the label was involved in the underground party scene, organising "guerrilla events at strange locations, without all the tricks and special effects that get at normal discos". But in 1992, as the Acid revival took off and trance tedium took over, Force Inc. "made a radical break", towards a breakbeat-oriented hardcore that was a weird parallel to the proto-Jungle emerging in Britain.
Szepanski and Force Inc. deserve respect for recognizing so precociously the
radicalism of the then universally deplored 'Ardcore. They even loved the
much derided accelerated 'squeaky voice' tracks that ruled in 1992.
"Maybe it was our peculiar warped interpretation, but the sped-up vocals
sounded like a serious attempt to deconstruct some of the ideologies of pop-
music. One dimension to this was using voices like instruments or noise,
destroying the pop ideology that says that the voice is the expression of the
human subject."
And so Force Inc. embarked upon its own "abstract Industrial take on UK
breakbeat", mashing together harsh sonorities and angelic samples over
ultra-fast breakbeats, as on Biochip C.'s marvellous "Hells Bells", available on the recent Force Inc. anthology Rauschen 10. Achim also licensed UK
tracks such as NRG's super-sentimental "I Need Your Lovin'" and material
by Force Mass Motion. "We did some great parties, our DJ friend Sasha
playing much faster than the English DJs, at 200 bpm, using an altered
Technics [deck] cranked up to +40. At this velocity, it was very abstract,
coming at you like a sound wall. It worked good for us but nobody else! We
were very isolated in Germany."
In 1993-94 Szepanski watched aghast as rave went overground in Germany,
with "the return of melody, New Age elements, insistently kitsch harmonies
and timbres". With this degeneration of the underground sound came the
consolidation of a German rave establishment, centred around the party
organisation Mayday and its record label Low Spirit, acts such as Westbam
and Marusha, and the music channel Viva TV. The charts were swamped
with Low-Spirit pop-Tekno smashes such as "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"
and Tears Don't Lie", based on tunes from musicals or German folk music.
And the alleged 'alternative' to this dreck was moribund, middlebrow electro-
trance music, as represented by Frankfurt's own Sven Vaeth and his
Harthouse label.
For Achim, what happened to German rave illustrated Deleuze and Guattari's
concepts of "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialisation".
Deterritorialisation is when a culture gets all fluxed up - punk, early rave,
Jungle - resulting in a breakthrough into new aesthetic, social and cognitive
spaces. Reterritorialisation is the inevitable stabilisation of chaos into a new order: the internal emergence of style codes and orthodoxies, the external co-optation of subcultural energy by the leisure industry. Szepanski has a groovy German word for what rave, once so liberating, turned into: 'Freizeitknast', a 'pleasure-prison'. Regulated experiences, punctual rapture, predictable music: "Boring!" sneers Achim.
Would he go so far as to describe a kind of aesthetic fascism at work in rave
culture? "The techniques of mass-mobilisation and crowd-consciousness have
similarities to fascism. Fascism was mobilising people for the war-machines,
rave is mobilising people for pleasure-machines."
In 1994 Achim started Mille Plateaux. Just as Force Inc. worked with and
against the demands of the dancefloor, Mille Plateaux is a kind of answer to
'electronic listening music' and the Ambient boom. Achim sees the label's
output as the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory, fleshing out concepts such
as the rhizome (a network of stems that are laterally connected), which is
opposed to hierarchical root-systems (such as those found in trees). In music,
'rhizomatic' equates with the Eno/dub idea of a democracy of sounds, a
dismantling of the normal ranking of instruments in the mix (usually
privileging the voice or lead guitar). Instead, says Achim, there's a
"synthesisation of heterogeneous sounds and material through a kind of
composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their
heterogeneity". Anticipated by the fractal funk and chaos-theorems of Can and
early 70s Miles Davis (the 'nobody solos, everybody solos' principle), rhizomatic music today takes the form of DJ cut 'n' mix (at its rare, daring best), avant garde HipHop and post-rock. And the output of Mille Plateaux, of course.
Another key Deleuze and Guattari trait shared by Mille Plateaux is an interest
in schizophrenic consciousness. Achim talks of admiring darkside hardcore
for its "paranoia", and mourns the way Jungle traded its vital madness for
"serious" musicality. "Since the 50s, in musique concrete, in
Industrial music, in Techno, one heard diverse noises, screaming, creaking,
hissing - all noises related more to madness," he explains. "Echo-effects allow
sound hallucinations to occur, they delocalise the perception apparatus,
allowing forms of perception to emerge that one had previously attributed to
lunatics or schizophrenics." For Achim, as for Deleuze and Guattari, such
sensory disorientation is valuable, acting as a deconstruction of
'subjectivity'.
Last year Szepanski contacted Deleuze himself, sending material by Oval and
other Mille artists, and asking if he'd write an essay for Achim's planned
anthology of techno theory, Maschinelle Strategeme. Thre great man
wrote back saying he couldn't do it, but gave his blessing to the label, and said he particularly dug Oval. "He even wrote about specific tracks!" exclaims
Achim. "Later, the German publisher of A Thousand Plateaux told us
this was really quite unusual, to get such a letter."
Not long after, the terminally ill, 70 year old Deleuze committed suicide.
Szepanski immediately organised the couble CD tribute In Memoriam
Gilles Deleuze. Featuring contributions from American post-rockers
Rome and Trans Am, DJ-philosopher Spooky, a gaggle of Achim's old allies in
the European experimental music scene, and all the usual Mille Plateaux-
affiliated suspects (Oval, Mouse On Mars, Cristian Vogel, Ian Pooley,
Scanner, Gas, etc), In Memoriam is probably the best thing the label
has put out yet. Stand-out tracks include the electroacoustic jiggery-pokery of
Alec-Empire's "Bon Voyage", the musique concrete Jungle of
Christophe Charles's "Undirections/Continuum", and Rome's Cluster-like
drone mosaic "Intermodal".
The ubiquitous Jim O'Rourke also appears, and is working on a sort of
O'Rourke versus Mille Plateaux remix project, using the entire Mille
catalogue as source material. Techno Animal may also be doing a remix
project based on the 'versus' concept, Techno Animal Versus Reality,
which will involve five guest collaborators; material will be shuttled back and
forth between each artist and the group, eventually resulting in ten versions of five tracks. And then there's Oval, who are currently scheming their way
towards a sort of Listener versus Oval scenario: a digital authoring system
that will enable the punter to make their own Oval records...
Interviewing Oval is, shall we say, challenging. Their methods are obscure,
their theory fabulously rarefied, their utterances marinated in irony. All that
can be safely said is that Oval's 'music' - however irrelevant aesthetics might
be to the trio - offers an uncanny, seductive beauty of treacherous surfaces and labyrinthine recesses.
Ironically, given Oval's polemical engagement with digital culture, my
encounter with the trio takes place in one of Frankfurt's new cyber-cafes.
Immediately there are communication problems. Humble enquiries about
backgrounds and influences are met with rolling of the eyes, sniggers, and
"Next question!" Tentative characterisations of their activity are treated as a
reduction or misrepresentation of the Oval project. So what are they
trying to do?
Put as simply as possible, Oval is "not so much about music as the technical
implementation of notions of music," says Markus Popp. "It's an effort in
sound-design rather than music with a capital M. The main content of our
effort is to have an audible user-interface."
In nuts and bolts terms, this means fucking with the hardware and software
that organises and enables today's post-rave Electronica. Most critical of these technologies is MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows
different pieces of equipment to be co-ordinated like players in a group, or
instrumental 'voices' in an orchestra. For Oval, this is precisely the problem.
"MIDI is basically a music-metaphor in itself, one that's so deplorably dated.
It's so constraining in every way, you have to go beyond these protocols."
Despite, or rather because of, this technology's reliance on "traditional music
syntax and semantics", Oval deliberately use the set-up, because their real
interest is in standardisation. Their first Mille Plateaux release
Systemisch, explains Sebastian Oschatz, "was done with a very cheap
MIDI set-up and a borrowed copy of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works
Vol II. This later turned out to be an Oval in-joke; apparently, Richard
James is one of many artists who have claimed that Systemisch was
based on their material. "That album is composed of material that is really old, and it got edited, layered and recombined so many times, it's stupid to ask whose music is this?" says Popp. "That is the only truly negligible aspect in our music. Most of the CDs we used were rented, and often they didn't have
their covers!"
Getting back to MIDI or a sampler/sequencer software such as Cubase (the
power tool of choice for the post-rave generation), Popp complains that "there is so much determinism within these programs, working with them involves so
much compliance to principles that are highly critical. In a social context
these technologies are mostly used in a contrlling way: monitoring the
workplace, worklace efficiency, optimising the user-interface. On-line
newsgroups are full of people who e-mail back to the manufacturers saying,
"We'll need this, change that", and all of this keeps them in front of their
computers even longer. Our way of dealing with this is to overcome the
manufacturer's distinction between 'features' and 'bugs'.
Which brings us to the famous Oval deployment of deliberately damaged CDs
to generate the raw material of their music: the glitches, skips and distressed
cyber-muzik that makes Systemisch and its sequel 94 Diskont
so ear-boggling. The CD-thang is another 'reduction' that irks Oval: "We did
use CDs, but that is neglectable, there are so many other things we could have
used... The important point was that the CD player has no distinction if it's an error or a proper part of the recording, it's just doing calculations,
algorithms."
This recalls Hendrix's aestheticisations of feedback, a 'bug' or improper effect immanent in the electric guitar but hitherto unexploited. Oval rejects terms like 'sabotage' to describe the CD treatments and the more esoteric forms of algorithmic mischief they wreak within hardware. But they do use the word
"disobedience", which also has a frisson of subversion, and talk,
deconstruction-style, of engaging in a kind of non-antagonistic dialogue with
corporate digital culture: Sony, IBM, Microsoft, et al.
Contradictions abound in Oval's own rhetoric. They speak in almost punk
'anyone-can-do-it' terms of deliberately keeping their activity at the "lowest
entry-level", of not wanting "to convey an image of arcane technology and
years of expert study in digital signal processing and programming". Yet their
discourse is often absurdly forbidding and user-unfriendly. Then there's the
way they deny any musical intentions, only to later come close to
characterising their project as an enrichment of music. They talk of not
wanting to produce a merely "predictable outcome" of the hardware and
software, of wishing to "offensively suggest" the existence of soundworlds
"from 'outside' the digital domain", of having invented a "completely new
music-paradigm".
Says Popp, "Another aspect of what we wanted to achieve musically is to
generate a new kind of perception. In the beginning, some labels sent back the
demo tapes because they said there's no music on it!" In that respect, Oval's
audio-mazes induce a 'perceptual dissonance' akin to the Op Art of Bridget
Reilly, or the perspectival chaos of Escher. Sebastian adds: "It works the other way: obvious mis-pressings on the albums, or DAT dorp-outs on certain
compilation tracks, don't get spotted during the production process!"
Future Oval projects include some kind of EP for Mille Plateaux; the US
release of Systemisch and Diskont, accompanied by "exclusive
material, possibly predating Systemisch", via the ultra-cool label Table
Of The Elements; and an 'interactive' product designed in collaboration with
British computer boffin Richard Ross.
"It's not exactly CD-ROM or hypertext," explains Popp. "But it will involve
guiding the user through some kind of design-environment, and basically
enabling people to do Oval records themselves. The working title is 'The Public
Domain Project', and it will involve a lot of work. We also want to investigate
the forthcoming video-disc; maybe there are ways to work with the
combination of optical and audio, new potentials. And we are thinking about
using the sounds of data processing itself - the sounds the computer or
sampler generate when they calculate or process the sound. There is always
sound somewhere in the mixing desk, when the stuff is stored or [screen]
window-boxes get closed or opened. We are thinking of recording this because
it is basically the sound of the user-interface itself."
At the other extreme from Oval's oblique strategies lies Alec Empire's
insurrectionary anarcho-Tekno. Empire and the Ovalboys appear to have had
some sort of ideological rift, in fact. Popp refuses to comment, but Empire
makes a veiled jibe about Oval doing "their music from this very intense
theory, whereas I do it not only from books but from what I feel."
An engaging fellow who's constantly laughing, usually at his own utterances,
Alec Empire divides his energy between recording solo albums for Mille
Plateaux (the sombre Electronica of 1995's Low On Ice, the zany Sun
Ra meets Perez Prado avant EZ-listening of the new Hypermodern Jazz
2000.5), and fostering the Berlin-based Digital Hardcore scene. This two-
pronged campaign reflects Empire's interestingly jumbled background. On
one hand, he studied music theory for a while and, unusually for a Techno
artist, uses notation when compsing his own music. On the other hand, he
was a breakdancer at the age of ten and playing in a punk group by the time he
was 12.
At the end of the 80s, Empire got swept up in Berlin's underground party
scene. Despite being anti-drugs himself, he embraced Acid's cult of
oblivion.
"For a lot of people at the Acid parties, it was about escaping from reality. At the time it made sense, politics seemed futile, with the Left dead, and even the autonomists seeming like silly kids rioting for fun."
The German scene quickly turned dark and nihilistic: "People got into heroin
and speed, there were parties in East Berlin with this very hard Industrial
Acid sound, Underground Resistance and Plus 8, 150 bpm."
Influenced by the abstract militancy of Underground Resistance, Empire
formed the agit-Tekno group Atari Teenage Riot. Atari signed to a major label,
but were dropped before they released an album. Wrecking a recording
studio's amplifier and running up huge cab bills by stopping off at record
stores, they were just too much trouble.
By this point - the end of 93 - Alec had already released around 15 EPs of solo
material on Force Inc. and other labels, including "Hunt Down The Nazis"
and "SuEcide". Meanwhile, he was experimenting with a Germanic Jungle
sound for Riot Beats, drawing on the influence of UK 'darkside' tracks by Bizzy
B and Reinforced. Darkcore remains an influence on Digital Hardcore, which
is both a scene and a label (DHR). "Our beats are fast and distorted, but the
programming is not as complex as the UK producers'".
Breakbeat appealed as both an antidote to Germanic Techno's Aryan
funklessness, and as a multicultural statement. "I did "Hunt Down The
Nazis" at a time when skinheads were attacking immigrants. Then you'd
discover, talking about the attacks to people on the rave scene, that a lot of
people were quite racist. At the Omen Club, Turkish kids were turned away for
no reason. There was quite a nationalistic aura to German Techno: 'Now we
are back on the map'. Mark Spoon from Jam And Spoon made a comment on
MTV, about how white people had Techno and black people had HipHop, and
that's the way it should stay. One neo-Nazi magazine even hailed trance
Techno as proper German music."
Ironically, Empire now thinks that UK Jungle has gotten too funky. "The
energy is missing. Jungle is just not forceful enough, and a whole night of it is
just too flat. The idea of mixing, of fading tracks into each other smoothly, is
over-rated. Pirate radio was better before the DJs learned to mix properly. DJ
technique is like a guitarist who knows how to make a really complicated
guitar solo. A Stooges riff can mean much more, with just three notes. If the
energy's not there, what's the point?"
With its speedfreak tempos and brutalist noise aesthetic, Digital Hardcore has
less in comon with Jungle than it does with that other descendant of original
1991 pan-European hardcore: the terror-Gabba and speedcore sounds of labels
like PCP, Kotzaak, Fischkopf, Cross Fade Entertainment, Praxis and
Gangstar Toons Industry (many of whom can be found on the Empire-
compiled Capital Noise Chapter 1 CD. DHR's own acts, such as
EC8OR, Moonraker, Killout Trash and Sonic Subjunkies, mash up 200 bpm
breaks, ultra-Gabba riffs, thrash-metal guitar, Riot Grrrl shouting, and lots of midfrequency noise. "In Techno, in Jungle, the middle frequencies are
taken out, it'ms all bass and treble," says Alec. "But the middle frequencies
are the rock guitar frequencies, it'ms where the aggression comes from."
As well as "boost the midrange, cut the bass", Digital Hardcore's other key
precepts are "tempo changes keep it exciting" and "faceless Techno PAs are
boring". At their parties, DJs favour a crush-collision mess-thetic of mixed up
styles and bpms, and there are always groups playing live. Instead of
hypnotising the listener into a headnodding stupor, Digital Hardcore is meant
to be a wake-up call.
So if rave is Heavy Metal (rowdy, stupefying) and Electronica is Progressive
rock (pseudo-spiritual, contemplative), does that mean Digital Hardcore
(angry, speedy, noisy) is punk rock? "The only similarity with punk is the
frustration," says Alec. "And that's also where our stuff differs from Mille
Plateaux: it's less theoretical, and perhaps more negative. All the kids are into
chaos and anarchy, because nothing else seems to work.
"There's this foundation of musicians who used to play at parties and have
now been put out of business by DJs: German Rock Musicians Against
Techno, and we want to join it." He pauses, then adds, "Just to take the piss."
Except I think he means it, man.