Achim Sepansky, the German radical writer and philosopher who founded several electronic and ambient music labels, including Mille Plateaux and Force Inc., has died. He wrote on Instagram: Sepanski was 67 when he was found dead on Wednesday, Sept. 25, his partner, Line Iwakura, said.
Sepanski, a Marxist thinker from the Frankfurt School lineage and a staunch clubber in his native Frankfurt, grew up in the post-punk scene before releasing techno records on his Blackout label in the 1980s.He founded Force Inc. in 1991 to explore more progressive techno and hard rock sounds including Mike Ink and Alec Empire, for example, the early works of the now canonized producers. He soon decided, however, that “innovative techno, from acid to breakbeat, was too closed a circle for electronic music.” with strict moral and conceptual standards.
As well as the heavier Riot Beats label, Sepanski founded Mille Plateaux in 1993, partly in response to what he called rave’s “commodification—the ordering of spaces and the factors of control.” [that] began to dominate the techno scene.’ (He described the rave condition as a “Freizeitknast,” a “pleasure-prison,” in a 1996 interview. The Wire:.) Borrowing the name from a book by Gilles Deluez and Félix Guattari A thousand plateausMille Plateaux released a range of musical styles perhaps best exemplified by the glitch aesthetic, known in label parlance as ‘clicks + cuts’, which Gilles Deleuze, then almost 70, became a fan of in his just before his death, Mille Plateaux became Sepanski’s most difficult success, releasing one landmark electronic album after another. by trailblazers including Gas, Oval, Cristian Vogel, Frank Bretschneider and Vladislav Delay until its disbandment in 2004.
Sepanski sold Mille Plateaux to musician and entrepreneur Markus Gabler, who was making slightly more accessible releases, sparking controversy among the label’s loyalists. When they last met, Gabler said in 2010, Sepanski “told me that he is out of business and hasn’t even turned on his stereo for months.I tried to get some feedback from him about our upcoming releases. but apparently he didn’t care.”
Sepanski continued to publish prolifically in anti-fascist philosophy books and articles on topics such as nothingness, emptiness, and nihilism, often through his Non-Copyriot website label, including Thomas Koehner. Motus and Simona Zamboli Ethernet:.