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bpm, using an altered Technics [deck] cranked up to +40. At this velocity, i t 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 t o German rave illustrated Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of "deterritorialisation"and "reterritorialisation".Deterritorialisationis 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: Oval 'freizeitknast', a 'pleasure-prison'. Regulated experiences, punctual rapture, immediately organised the double CD tribute In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze. Featuring predictablemusic: "Boring!" sneers Achim. contributions from American post-rockers Rome and Trans Am, DJ-philosopher Would he go so far as to describe a kind of aesthetic fascism at work in rave Spooky, a gaggle of Achim's old allies in the European experimental music scene, and culture? "The techniques of mass-mobilisation and crowd-consciousness have all the usual Mille Plateaux-affiliated suspects (Oval, Mouse On Mars, Cristian Vogel, similarities to fascism. Fascism was mobilising people for the war-machines, rave is lan Pooley, Scanner, Gas, etc), In Memoriam is probably the best thing the label has mobilising people for pleasure-machines." put out yet. Stand-out tracks include the electroacoustic jiggery-pokery of Alec In 1 9 9 4 Achim started Mille Plateaux. Just as Force Inc worked with and against Empire's "Bon Voyage", the musique concrete Jungle of Christophe Charles's the demands of the dancefloor, Mille Plateaux is a "UndirectionslContinuum", and Rome's Clusterkind of answer to 'electronic listening music' and like drone-mosaic "Intermodal". the Ambient boom. Achim sees the label's output 66 h the beginning,=me labels sent The ubiquitous Jim O'Rourke also appears, and as the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory, fleshing is working on a sort of O'Rourke versus Mille out concepts such as the rhizome (a network of back Our demo tapesbecause Plateaux remix project, using the entire Mille stems that are laterally connected), which is opposed to hierarchical root-systems (such as saidthere's nomusiconit YY catalogue as source material. Techno Animal may also be doing a remix project based around those found i n trees). In music, ' rhizomatic' the 'versus' concept, Techno Animal Versus equates with the Enoldub idea of a democracy of sounds, a dismantling of the normal Realm, which will involve five guest collaborators; material will be shuttled back and ranking of instruments in the mix (usually privileging the voice or lead guitar). Instead, forth between each artist and the group, eventually resulting in ten versions of five says Achim, there's a "synthesisationof heterogenous sounds and material through a tracks. And then there's Oval, who are currently scheming their way towards a sort of kind of composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their Listener versus Oval scenario: a digital authoring system that will enable the punter to heterogeneity". Anticipated by the fractal funk and chaos-theorems of Can and early make their own Oval records 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 nterviewing Oval is, shall we say, challenging. Their methods are obscure, their and post-rock And the output of Mille Plateaux, of course. Itheory fabulously rarefied, their utterances marinated in irony. All that can be safely said is that Oval's 'music' - however irrelevant aesthetics may be to the trio -offers A nother key Deleuze and Guattari trait shared by Mille Plateaux is an interest in an uncanny, seductive beauty of treacherous surfaces and labyrinthine recesses. schizophrenic consciousness. Achim talks of admiring darkside hardcore for its Ironically, given Oval's polemical engagement with digital culture, my encounter with "paranoia", and mourns the way Jungle traded its vital madness for "serious" the trio takes place in one of Frankfurt's new cyber-cafes. Immediately there are musicality. "Since the 5 0 s in musique concrete, in Industrial music, in Techno, one communication problems. Humble enquiries about backgrounds and influences are heard diverse noises, screaming, creaking, hissing - all noises one related more to met with rolling of the eyes, sniggers, and "Next question!" Tentative characterisations madness," he explains. "Echo-effects allow sound hallucinations t o occur, they of their activity are treated as a reduction or misrepresentation of the Oval project. So delocalise the perception apparatus, allowing forms of perception to emerge that one what are they thing to do? had previouslyattributed to lunatics or schizophrenics." For Achim, as for Deleuze and Put as simply as possible, Oval is "not so much about music as the technical Guattari, such sensory disorientation is valuable, acting as a deconstruction of implementationof notions of music," says Markus Popp. "It's an effort in sounddesign 'subjectivity'. rather than music with a capital M. The main content of our effort is t o have an Last year Szepanski contacted Deleuze himself, sending material by Oval and other audible user-nterface." Mille artists, and asking if he'd write an essay for Achim's planned anthology of techno In nuts and bolts terms, this means fucking with the hardware and software that theory, Maschinelle Stmtegeme. The great man wrote back saying he couldn't do it, organises and enables today's post-rave Electronica. Most critical of these but gave his blessing to the label, and said that he particularly dug Oval. "He even technologies is MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows different wrote about specific tracks!" exclaims Achim. "Later, the German publisher of A pieces of equipment to be co-ordinated like the players in a group, or instrumental ThousandPlateaus told us this was really quite unusual, to get such a letter." 'voices' in an orchestra. For Oval, this is precisely the problem. "MIDI is basically a Not long after, the terminally ill, 7 0 year old Deleuze committed suicide. Szepanski music-metaphor in itself, one that's so deplorably dated. It's so constraining in every The Wire 29

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