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http://www.mille-plateaux.net/theory/download/raynolds-thewire.pdfSimon Reynolds "low end theory"
first published in 'the wire' #146 (4/96)
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 meets
label boss Achim Szepanski and 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 anticapitalist
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 outpourings 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 "eunuchlike
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 frenzies 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 conservative 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 antirave
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
"disjunctivesingularities") 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 decided 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 tripping 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 "guerilla events at strange
locations, without all the tricks and special effects that you 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 recognising so precociously the radicalism of
the then universally deplored 'Ardkore. They even loved the much derided accelerated 'squeaky
voice' tracks that ruled in 1992.
"Maybe it was just 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 Vath and his Harthouse label.
For Achim, what happened to German rave illustrated Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of
"deterritorialisation" 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".
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