Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 17:59:38 +1000
From: "dr.woooo" <dr.woooo-AT-nomasters.org>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Reynolds: "Mille Plateaux: The Rhizomatic Music of Frankfurt, Germany"



After a tough week at work it is great to listen to some dark-hardcore, or 
gabba. I always thought the rage and chaos of it was a good way to blast out my 
frustrations. i was into it before 'politics' proper, ie. getting involved in 
radical politics and the anarchism.  this was a fun read, and gives me some 
artists to look up.

thanks


Quoting "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>:

> Mille Plateaux: The Rhizomatic Music of Frankfurt,
> Germany
> 
> by Simon Reynolds
> 
> (taken without permission from the wire 146, april
> 1996)
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> LOW THEORIES
> 
> 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.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Early 1996, a club in Meinz near Frankfurt, a
> Vauxhall-Arches-style catacomb carved into the
> concrete foundations of a bridge over the big river
> (whose name I forget). That's where I fell in love
> with house again, after a long period of thinking it
> the lightweight option c.f. jungle. Accompanied by
> Force Inc/Mille Plateaux boss and lager connoisseur
> Achim Szepanski, I'd came to check out a set by
> Chicago DJ Gene Farris of Relief/Casual/Force Inc
> reknown. Helped by copious alcohol intake and a
> contact high from the killer vibe in that murky
> crowded cavern, a revelation began to unfold: just how
> much fantastic music I'd missed out on through being
> such a monomaniacal junglist patriot, and the extent
> to which house had a rebirth of creativity in the
> mid-Nineties after a long null lull of tribal tedium
> and handbag hackwork. Farris played so much great
> stuff--from early filter-house/disco cut-up stuff to
> Relief-style nu-acid to stuff so techy, tracky and
> abstrakkk it was essentially what we'd today call
> micro-house. But if a single song can be said to have
> opened my ears it was when Farris dropped "Flash" by
> Green Velvet. When those double-time snares kicked in,
> it was one of those whatdafuck?!?!?!?! see-the-light
> moments.
> 
>    
> 
> ====> "The world is the natural setting of and field for all my thoughts and all my
> explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man' or more
> accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world and only in the world
> does he know himself."
> 
>  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945
> 
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