Futurism Restated #83: Remembering Mille Plateaux’s Achim Szepanski

Highlights from the iconic experimental imprint and its sister labels Force Inc. and Ritornell

I bought Oval’s Systemisch the year it came out, in 1994, from Providence’s Fast Forward, the record store that introduced me to the very idea of experimental or leftfield electronic music. I don’t recall the day I bought the CD—it might have been playing in the shop, or perhaps that matte gray cover caught my eye and I gave the CD a spin on the in-store CD player and headphones—but I vividly remember being at home in my living room, sitting in front of my slate-colored mini stereo system, with its futuristic angles and sleek beveling, and trying to wrap my mind around what I was hearing: the telltale clicks and chirps of a skipping CD, set against voluminous bass throb and looped into elliptical patterns. A feast of textures spread before me: nubby, shirred, wavy like patterned glass. For all its obviously digital essence, it was also soft and warm and almost powdery, a cottony snowdrift of artifacts.

That was my introduction to Mille Plateaux, the record label—more than just a label, really; an entire aesthetic universe—founded by Achim Szepanski, who died this month at the age of 67. Mille Plateaux was just one of Szepanski’s outlets. Beginning in 1991, he founded a veritable empire of imprints and sublabels, beginning with Force Inc. Music Works. Talk about an appropriate name: Force Inc. was just that, an unstoppable force in European techno until 2004, when the collapse of EFA distribution took the label down with it.

In its first few years, Force Inc. was largely indistinguishable from scores of like-minded European labels that were inspired by Detroit and Chicago, and feeding off the global explosion of energy that rave had unleashed. Early releases came from German rave pioneers like Ian Pooley, DJ Tonka, Air Liquide’s Dr. Walker and Jammin’ Unit, Love Inc. (aka future Kompakt cofounder Wolfgang Voigt), future noise terrorist Alec Empire, et al.; before long they were also reaching out to Chicago artists like Gene Farris, DJ Rush, and Glenn Underground. 

Parallel to this resolutely club- and rave-focused activity, though, came the more experimentally minded Mille Plateaux, founded in 1994. If its initial compilation, Modulation & Transformation, suggested merely a more atmospheric spin on the era’s rave sounds—much the way Warp’s Artificial Intelligence had done two years before—Mille Plateaux quickly veered outward with first Cristian Vogel’s Beginning to Understand and then, decisively, Oval’s Systemisch. From that point on, the label’s identity as a platform for iconoclastic, experimental, and unabashedly intellectual work (the label’s name came from the postmodernist philosophers Deleuze & Guattari) was sealed. 

Over the coming years, Mille Plateaux and Force Inc. (which veered toward minimal techno around the turn of the millennium) racked up classic after classic, in virtually every style imaginable: dark ambient from Thomas Köner; dub techno from Porter Ricks; post-rock from Dean Roberts; ambient techno from GAS; conceptual electronica from Terre Thaemlitz. They made a short-lived detour into drum & bass with the Position Chrome sublabel and Panacea’s Low-Profile Darkness. With Experimental Audio Research’s The Köner Experiment, they brought together Porter Ricks, Kevin Martin (the Bug, Techno Animal), Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, Thomas Köner, AMM’s Eddie Prévost—and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Martin Shields. (I mean seriously, what the fuck.) They explored some of their most experimental music with the Ritornell sublabel, home to extreme minimalism and digital abstraction from Kim Cascone, Taylor Deupree, Stephan Mathieu, and the all-star quintet of Ambarchi/Fennesz/Pimmon/Rehberg/Rowe.

Like all great labels, Mille Plateaux made its impact cumulatively, release after release, each new twist and turn informing what had come before, and what would come after. The Electric Ladyland series explored brow-furrowed downtempo and abstract beats. Modulation & Transformation slid sideways, opening up to artists like Scanner, DJ Spooky, and Jim O’Rourke. In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze made explicit the label’s debt to critical theory (and helped rope in a generation of semiotics students like me; I may not have understood much from the Verso and Routledge books my grad school professors were assigning me, but Mille Plateaux assured me of the essential coolness of the discipline). 

In the CD era, compilations played a crucial role in both developing new artists for the label and mapping new conceptual frontiers. In this sense, Mille Plateaux’s most iconic compilation is undoubtedly 2000’s Clicks_+_Cuts, distilled emergent tendencies in minimalism, digital composition, and glitch aesthetics into a wide-ranging manifesto featuring artists like SND, Pole, Pan Sonic, Sutekh, and Kit Clayton. The following year’s Clicks & Cuts 2—for which I wrote the liner notes, which I’ve reprinted below—was even wide-ranging; it might be the definitive statement of the y2k-era glitch aesthetic.

I never met Szepanski, and though we traded the occasional email, I don’t recall ever having an actual conversation with him. He was famously irascible, his philosophy and character clearly informed by the anarchic spirit of ’80s and ’90s Germany. Following his death, CDM gathered a handful of tributes from his friends and peers. Rave pioneer Tanith recalled a fallout over divergent values: “He was too grumpy about the world—although, of course, what he postulated was always razor-sharp and well-dissected.” Dr. Walker remembered him, fondly, as an “old stone-throwing dissident… Dealing with you was like experiencing techno as it was meant to be: direct, wild, surreal, entertaining, serious, dada-istic, communistic, elitist and anti-elitist at the same time. Earthy, brutal, open, in-your-face – full of love, in love with yourself, not in love with yourself, uncontrollable, breathtakingly new and different, badass, fkkd up…. Consistently inconsistent.” From his output alone, it is clear that he was driven by a seemingly bottomless well of energy. (It must be said that it is an overwhelmingly male catalog; for all his progressive politics, Achim didn’t do a great job of bringing women into the fold. But it’s also true that the pool of producers was overwhelmingly male then.)

The collapse of EFA distribution, as the CD market collapsed in the early 2000s, spelled the end. There were various relaunches over the years—some under different owners, some by Szepanski himself—but none of them held. The momentum was gone; the world had moved on. (Even at their peak, Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux weren’t always known for their quality control, and sometimes their attempts to carve out new subgenres fell flat.) But it hardly matters. Electronic music would be very diffferent without the example set by Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux. “Bring something incomprehensible into this world,” exhorted Delueze in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the text that gave the label its name. That’s exactly what Szepanski did, release after release, time and again making the incomprehensible seem not just legible but inevitable.

After the jump, for paying subscribers, I’ve put together an annotated list of a couple dozen faves from the Mille Plateaux / Force Inc. / Ritornell catalogs, with Bandcamp links where possible, along with a playlist of key tracks on both Spotify and Apple Music. I’ve also reprinted my liner notes from Clicks & Cuts 2, which, read from this distance, feel almost like they were written by a different person. I suppose in some sense, they were. But it’s just as true that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without Mille Plateaux.