Achim Szepanski, Founding father of Influential Digital Labels Mille Plateaux and Pressure Inc., Dies at 67

Achim Szepanski, the novel German creator and thinker who based a number of digital and ambient music labels, together with Mille Plateaux and Pressure Inc., has died, Pressure Inc. wrote on Instagram. His colleague Lain Iwakura mentioned he was discovered useless on Wednesday, September 25. Szepanski was 67 years previous.

Szepanski, a Marxist thinker within the Frankfurt Faculty lineage and a religious club-goer in his Frankfurt hometown, grew up within the post-punk scene earlier than releasing techno information within the Nineteen Eighties on his Blackout label. He based Pressure Inc., in 1991, to discover extra ahead techno and hardcore sounds, together with early works by now-canonized producers like Mike Ink and Alec Empire. He quickly determined, nonetheless, that “modern techno, from acid to breakbeat, was a too closed body for digital music.” Report labels, in his view, have been a type of praxis, held to rigorous ethical and conceptual requirements.

In addition to the heavier Riot Beats label, Szepanski laid the foundations for Mille Plateaux in 1993, partly in response to what he referred to as rave’s “commodification—the order of areas and management components [that] began to dominate the techno scene.” (He described the state of rave as “Freizeitknast,” a “pleasure-prison,” in a 1996 interview with The Wire.) Taking the title from Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari’s ebook Thousand Plateaus, Mille Plateaux launched an array of musical kinds maybe finest exemplified by the glitch aesthetic—termed “clicks + cuts” within the label’s parlance—of which Gilles Delueze, by then almost 70, turned a fan, shortly earlier than his dying by suicide. Mille Plateaux turned Szepanski’s most enduring success, placing out one landmark album after one other by digital trailblazers together with Fuel, Oval, Cristian Vogel, Frank Bretschneider, and Vladislav Delay earlier than its dissolution in 2004.

Szepanski bought Mille Plateaux to the musician and entrepreneur Marcus Gabler, who advocated for barely extra accessible releases, stoking controversy among the many label’s loyalists. Once they had final met, Gabler mentioned in 2010, Szepanski “informed me he was out of the music enterprise and didn’t even activate his stereo for months. I attempted to get some suggestions about our forthcoming releases from him, however apparently he wasn’t .”

Szepanski continued to prolifically publish books and articles of anti-fascist philosophy, on topics equivalent to nothingness, vacancy, and nihilism, typically by way of his Non-Copyriot web site. He ultimately retook management of Mille Plateaux, and, in recent times, launched a few of his favourite albums on the label, together with Thomas Köner’s Motus and Simona Zamboli’s Ethernity.