The works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and in particular the two works Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaux from which the above extract is taken, have been very much a la mode in both academia and electronic music circles in the last decade.  Their work is characterised by a refusal to follow traditional disciplinary and conceptual hierarchies, and by a proliferation of concepts that blur the lines between scientific/philosophical and aesthetic language. Anti-Oedipus, the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, introduced the concept of 'schizoanalysis' and attempted a critique of psychoanalytic thought that in the process considered diverse philosophical, social, political and aesthetic concerns.  By the time of the second volume, A Thousand Plateaux, what [Ronald] Bogue terms 'Deleuzoguattarian' [2] thought had become even more wide-ranging, introducing a series of vocabularies and concepts that, Bogue claims, constitute an 'alternative cosmos' of thought. [3]  Bogue argues that Deleuzoguattarian notions are structured around:

One of the most persistent Deleuzoguattarian themes is a critique of what they term 'arborescent' (tree-like) systems of thought and practice that have dominated Western thinking.  These systems are strictly hierarchical and rigid.  In opposition to this mode Deleuze and Guattari proposed the concept of the 'rhizome': a non-hierarchical warren-like network that is horizontally rather than vertically oriented.  A Thousand Plateaus is a 'rhizomatic' structure composed of 'plateaus' – non-linear zones of continuous intensity. Each chapter is a 'plateau" that it is possible to read asequentially. The chapters range from discussions of animal behaviour (birds and wolves) and the history of nomads to semiotics and totalitarianism. Two chapters in particular are heavily focussed on music: '1837: Of The Refrain' and '1730: Becoming-Intense, becoming-Animal'. Amongst the composers discussed are Wagner, Schumann, Verdi, Messiaen, Mozart, Debussy, Berg and, most relevantly here, Varèse, Cage, and Stockhausen.

Deleuze and Guattari write approvingly of experimental music and play with the similarities they see between their concepts and then emergent music technology, at one point going so far as to characterise philosophy as a 'thought synthesizer'. [5]  In turn, Bogue employs electronic music as a metaphor to explain their thought. [6] However, most theoretical work on Deleuzoguattarian thought has been applied to philosophy, or to other media such as photography and cinema, rather than directly to music. FN

Fittingly for such an experimental outlook the Deleuzoguattarian approach to music has emerged into audibility within the sphere of popular music rather than through the traditional routes of critical commentary.  At the start of the nineties Achim Szcepanski, a student who had studied Deleuze and Guattari's works and previously been involved in the eighties industrial scene, made a radical conceptual connection between Deleuzoguattarian thought and the new dance musics that were emerging in the aftermath of the success of Acid House.  In 1991 Sczepanski established a label in Frankfurt named Force Inc., probably in reference to Deleuze's characterization of music as an art that harnesses forces (see Bogue 1996). [7]  Although the label was primarily oriented towards energetic, linear dancefloor tracks it already contained the seeds of a more ambitious project. The label's compilations are entitled 'Rauschen', a German term that can variously translate as 'roar, rustle, rush, or intoxication', intended to suggest the presence of such vivifying qualities within the music. The sleeve of Rauschen II contained a quote from Deleuze's work on Foucault and served as an indicator that the concepts behind the label were more elaborate than the music (mutant strains of hardcore, techno, house and proto-jungle) might appear to suggest. FN

The key Deleuzoguattrian concept that Sczepanski is attuned to is the twin notion of 'territorialization' and 'deterritorialization'.   Deterritorialization is manifest in the form of philosophical, artistic or scientific creation that throws into flux more rigid systems.   However under capitalism any such creative intervention is at constant risk of 'reterritorialization' - becoming rigid or assimilated to existing orders.  Bogue claims that Deleuze and Guattari stand for a 'politics of creativity' [8]:  interventions based on gaps, interregna and middles rather than finite endings or beginnings. FN

Sczepanski applied this analysis to the almost instant commodification of each new sub-genre of dance music and stresses the importance of music able to effect deterritorialization, in other words to ensure a constant creative flux that not only protects itself from assimilation but spreads itself like a virus into mainstream electronic and dance musics that, in the German context, Sczepanski (1996) has characterised as 'a sticky mixture of potential fascism and kitsch'. [9]  In 1994, in response to the ever-present threat of reterritorialization (which might also be understood as reification or stagnation), Sczepanski added a new label to the Force Inc. structure, Mille Plateaux, named after the original French title of A Thousand Plateaus. [10]  In setting up the label Sczepanski was certainly inspired by Deleuze's comment that theory should be practical, 'like a toolbox', and in the work of the label theory does attain an aesthetic and [micro]political effectivity.  Mille Plateaux releases often contain theoretical essays explicitly relating the work of the label and its artists to Deleuzoguattarian concepts and this philosophical framework (based on a motif or imperative of constant deterritorialization) informs the nature of the sounds released on the label, the criteria for which are aesthetic choices in relation to speed, texture and arrangement.  In developing the label's framework Szcepanski moves forward from the fantastic-metaphorical-machinic vocabulary of Deleuzoguattarianism that with hindsight can be read as being especially suited to electronic music.  The theoretical and aesthetic interventions of the label Mille Plateaux provide a new way to read back the book that inspired them and have undoubtedly help spread these concepts far beyond the academic community. FN

The label is presented as a rhizomatic network, establishing pathways for new flows and (hopefully) facilitating recurrent deterritorialization.  Initially the label allowed artists already associated with Force Inc. to produce more experimental variants of their sounds and to move beyond the requirements of the dancefloor.  Over time the label established itself as a paradigm for electronic experimentation and brought in a series of new artists who at that time had no obvious 'home' or who remained isolated within obscure scenes and labels.  The resulting collisions and combinations collapse or throw into flux a series of apparently fixed oppositions that until recently have remained unquestioned within thinking about popular music.  Divisions between categories such as 'serious' and 'popular', or 'avant-garde' and 'commercial', come under serious scrutiny from a label that features the work of industrial music pioneers (Zoviet: france), dancefloor producers (Kerosene) and electro-acoustic producers (Arno Peeters, Christophe Charles).  This seemingly impossible gathering of diverse artists is made feasible by the underlying philosophical-aesthetic framework, which allows for the constant deterritorialization of its own sound.  The function of such a well-defined if fluid 'label as paradigm' is to act as a pre-signal of the sonic or philosophical departure points of the label and to maintain a generic consistency of presentation whilst remaining sufficiently open so as to avoid becoming formulaic.

So how does this paradigm manifest as a philosophical-aesthetic praxis and what does it imply in terms of the actual sounds associated with the label?  Or, put differently, which aesthetic qualities does the label derive from Deleuzoguattarian thought?   Writing in 1995 in the sleevenotes to a Force Inc. release, Sczepanski sought to define the Mille Plateaux 'vision' and to try draw new audiences towards it:

The 'Rauschen' concept implies an extension of the electronic musician's sound palette to include not just the mechanical noise aestheticized by the Futurists and their successors in industrial music, but the normally non-audible or super-audible 'noise' of the digital age: the sounds of hard drives and system codes.  Mille Plateaux is one of the labels most strongly associated with the contemporary 'glitch' school of electronic music, retrieving compositional potential from flaws on the surface of digital perfection. [13]  Since the introduction of the compact disc in the early eighties there has been a school of thought that is inherently suspicious of the digital medium: not purely because of its tendency to clip and compress certain frequencies (particularly bass) but because of its indelible association with the major record labels and their (unsuccessful) attempt to price vinyl into obsolescence. FN

The aesthetic challenge to digital perfection and the Mille Plateaux attitude are exemplified by the work of the German duo Oval. [14]  Oval's primary sonic methodology has been the deliberate sabotage of compact discs and the processing of the subsequent flawed, stuttering playback into cyclical flows of post-ambient sound.  The looped CD errors around which the tracks cycle create a post-linear flow that draws attention to micro-textural effects.  The problematization of the digital creates a sometimes serene flow or 'rausch' that would not be audible without the physical intervention on the digital format and the processing of the subsequent results.  These interventions deterritorialize the smooth flow of digital musicality and undermine the CD medium's claims to indestructibility whilst highlighting the repressed sonic potential that a regime of perfection suppresses.  However it is important to stress that this is not a luddite anti-technological approach to technology but a critique of the passive acceptance of its limitations.  Oval's Markus Popp has spent most of the time since their key releases Systemisch and 94 Diskont at work on the development of a computer-based system for self-generating music, which the operator can constantly shape and re-shape. FN

The approach that informs the label and at least some of its artists is the attempt to go beyond the given limitations of genre and technology and to liberate the potential identified by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux in relation to the synthesizer, which they claimed was itself a rhizomatic network.

It would be overstating the case to claim on the basis of these references that Deleuze or Guattari were 'prophets' of subsequent developments in electronic music but it is certainly significant that in 1980 they could already see the potential within electronic technology to create a music based upon flaw and flux.  At the time of the book's appearance, the scratch based aesthetic of hip-hop was still unheard-of, while the 'cut and paste' techniques of electro-acoustic composers reached only a specialised audience.  The tape-cut ups of Industrial bands such as Cabaret Voltaire and before them of William Burroughs were increasingly well-known.  Deleuze and Guattari managed to extrapolate from these pioneering forms and foresee the methodologies of contemporary electronic musics.  Their imagining of its potentials has (through its influence on Sczepanski and Mille Plateaux) affected the directions in which the music presently flows.

Although Deleuze was informed of and apparently gave his approval to the label shortly before his death, it was only after his death with the release by Mille Plateaux of a double tribute album In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze that the 'debt' owed by the electronic community was fully marked. [16]  The artists featured ranged from industrial producers of the seventies to electro-acoustic producers and through to the new generation of electronica producers such as Cristian Vogel and Alec Empire.  Of the younger producers, many use the label as an opportunity to develop new creative personae beyond the conventional styles they are known for.  Thus techno and house producers who emerged from the Force Inc. label such as Mike Ink and Ian Pooley appear (either under their own name or a pseudonym) on this and other Mille Plateaux compilations, deploying sound-formations that in Deleuzoguattarian terminology extend the lines of force present in their better known work and hopefully bring at least some of their listeners along with them into more experimental soundscapes.  The fact that the compilations cohere so well suggests that the label has at least at times embodied the Deleuzoguattarian ideal of an open system, ignoring apparent contradictions and the genre boundaries constructed and enforced by other labels and the media. FN

Although he has since broken with the label for several years, Alec Empire, the key figure behind the agit-punk-noise group Atari Teenage Riot and the Digital Hardcore label, [17] combined his insurrectionary jungle and noise career with a series of increasingly abstract and formal experimental albums released on Mille Plateaux that moved through raw, abrasive techno and electronica to futuristic jazz and electro-acoustic formalism, demonstrating the scope afforded by the label to experimentation. [18]  The presence on the label of other producers such as Panacea, primarily associated with militant noise ethics, explodes the belief that values such as force, speed and complexity are mutually exclusive and allows for the production of new hybrid forms across a range of styles from [post]noise to complex ambience and formalistic experimentation.  Within this system a figure such as DJ Spooky, a New York producer as conversant with abstract philosophy and electro-acoustic methodology as with hip-hop techniques is not exceptional but typical.  Under these conditions it is possible for the same label to receive praise from both intellectual and critical circles and from underground fanzines, and to transcend the restrictions of either art music or subcultures. FN

How then does Deleuze and Guattari's description of a 'cosmic continuum of which even holes, silence, ruptures and breaks are a part' relate to the range of compositional practices present on the label and to present understandings of 'the cosmic' in music? [19]  This has been a problematic notion within popular music due to its association with the aesthetic excesses of the progressive rock movement, which crippled the aesthetic potentials of early technology with its crushingly fey literalism.  However in the post-Deleuzoguattarian, post-techno context it has become possible once again for music to successfully invoke 'the cosmic' through abstraction, deterritorialization and the use of contemporary (conceptual and) compositional techniques.  On the four albums by Gas [a.k.a Cologne techno producer Mike Ink] a 'cosmic' quality is achieved through juxtaposition and indefinite extension of the source sounds.  The Zauberberg album samples and processes extracts from works by Wagner, Berg and Schoenberg.  The string samples are stretched almost into drones and set against a muffled 4/4 house beat, creating a womb like ambience textured by infinitely delayed banks of strings, linear but in constant flux.  There is no shortage of complacent and 'cosmetic' contemporary ambient music but Gas's work manages to escape the genre's frequent falls into kitsch without sacrificing [the desire for] 'beauty' which is produced through the juxtaposition of the classical and contemporary elements (the track '1912' is perhaps the most successful example of this). [20]  Some of the work of Gas and of related producers such as Sturm can sometimes sound surprisingly sweet and melodic given the expectations raised by the potentially intimidating theoretical density surrounding the label, but even the lighter Mille Plateaux tracks serve if nothing else to challenge hierarchical divisions between the theoretical and the sensual, or between mind and body as polar opposites. [21]  Mille Plateaux artists offer both straightforward (though always slightly altered) sonic beauty and a rarer type of aesthetic pleasure based on flux and the bringing into audibility of incongruous elements.  Examples of both approaches are audible in the work of Curd Duca who electronically processes both classical material (abstract versions of Wagner produced on a Moog synthesizer) and perhaps more radically easy listening 'muzak' in his Elevator Music series. [22]  The track 'Touch' is based around fragments of a dreamy female pop vocal which unaltered might seem archaic or mere kitsch, at odds with the contemporary electronic sensibility. [23]  However Duca's intervention splinters the female vocal into short phonetic blocks that consolidate a new vocal-electronic texture of delirious repetition, allowing the recovery of a sense of beauty from the closed system of the original material.  Whilst not all the artists are consciously attempting to render audible theory, what such experiments do achieve is to configure theory (or at the least an abstracted technological praxis) as a sensual-textual experience encoded into sound. FN

Finally I want briefly to consider the most abstract and experimental works on the label, the more introspective, genre and technology-referential interventions.  To understand this compositional mode we can refer to Bogue's summary of Deleuze's work on Kafka, which characterises his unfinished novels as 'open-ended machines which execute a perpetual deterritorialization'. [24]  Much techno and electronica is extremely linear in structure, a formula that is easy and profitable to recreate in commodified form, facilitating both a democratisation of music-making and systematic overproduction.  The ever-increasing speed with which each new electronic sub-genre reaches market saturation point leads to an imperative to play with the structure of genre expectations (the tempos and textures recognised as confirming a track's membership within a certain sub-genre). [25]  The label's ethos allows the artists to make micro-political interventions upon genre templates, applying 'clicks and cuts' to the 'body' of electronic music. [26]  The certainties of genre formulae are negated and deterritorialized through the manipulation of speed and texture.  The tools of this approach are the (ab)use of distortion, delay and breaks, as well as the extraneous noise most software and hardware is designed to eliminate in order to allow the smooth unfolding of the sonic product. FN

Some Mille Plateaux artists are otherwise unknown and appear only occasionally on the label's compilations.  One of these, Blue Byte, exemplify the process of genre (dis)integration on the 1998 track 'Divine 8'. [27]  This takes the template of a fairly predictable industrial/techno track and sets it in perpetual flux by frustrating its momentum.  Whilst the piece achieves impact and movement this never accumulates for more than a few seconds before falling back into itself, the emergence of the next set of beats seeming to stumble on the delayed exit of the previous set.  The track draws attention to the way in which the once confrontational and abrasive textures of genres such as industrial and techno can themselves come to constitute formulaic and commercialised forms.  The disintegrative quality of the track alludes to the disintegration of electronic genres into predictability and seeks to restore (if only for the short time before the listener becomes accustomed to the error pattern) unpredictability.  Other tracks take the process further and are closer in spirit to the painstaking assemblages of electro-acoustic music.  Cristian Vogel is a South American born British based student of composition who, on labels such as Tresor, produces linear if unusually densely textured techno.  His work for Mille Plateaux (in particular the Specific Momentific album from 1996) is, as might be expected, far more deconstructive, building power not through linear momentum but through the gradual accumulation and (technically ungainly) syncopation of diverse sound elements.  Off-kilter time signatures, intermittent beat patterns and delayed chords in minor keys set the music onto a distinctive trajectory away from genre formulas.  Many such tracks have a strangely anthemic and even seductive air of morbidity or sensual decay, marking the presence of a compositional virus that sometimes subtly and sometimes systematically causes tonal mutation of the original genre templates.  Initially some of the references that produce such effects are audible primarily to fellow producers and seasoned listeners, and constitute a mode of aesthetic appreciation based on the negation of expectations, the misplacement or elisions of an expected beat or effect, a category of beauty as much conceptual or philosophical as aesthetic.  In other words, if on the dancefloor a DJ produces pleasure by deploying 'that' beat at 'that' moment, a Mille Plateaux type producer will generally produce, if not pleasure, then interest or admiration by deploying a beat or an effect at a moment that genre conventions and possibly the track up to that point suggest is 'wrong'.  It is tempting to characterise this mode as 'meta machine music', works that comment upon the process and limitations of contemporary electronic composition, rendering these audible to create and reprocess new forms. FN

It should be stressed that such methodologies are also capable of producing works that approximate more closely to more conventional notions of warmth or of beauty in music, even when produced from amusical 'found sounds' or the internal sounds of music production equipment.  Mille Plateaux works allowed by their creators to unfold in more conventional fashion are often based on non-conventional instrumentation.  Electro-acoustic producer Arno Peeters' Aeroson project weaves fax signals, wolf calls, TV dialogue, and other electronic found sound into a work that makes audible the 'rausch' of the ecosphere and the infosphere, and the interplay between the two.  Accompanying the album is a graphic which breaks down the sounds into colour-coded categories and maps their emergence and disappearance: an attempt at visualising an 'electronic score' based not on notation but on the symbolic classification of sonic types.  The result of these arcane and intricate processes is as often lyrical as unsettling and combines micropolitical critique with a strange melancholic beauty formed from the combination of its elements.  To quote from the sleevenotes:

This recalls Deleuze and Guattari's prescient 1980 observation that music has entered 'the age of the machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of forces to be harnessed.' [29] FN

Yet besides the self-appointed macro objective – to render audible the cosmic forces of machine age sonorities – other artists produce works based on micro-aesthetics: infinitely subtle and brief textures and sounds taken not from the external world but purely from the internality of electronic music production.  In this category can be found artists such as Frank Bretschneider and the British duo snd, who take abstract sound design and imagery to a new level of minimalism but see no need to sacrifice warmth to this austere process.  The snd album 'makecassette' is an accretional, tidal work composed of digital clicks and smeared, liquefied tones that make it difficult to distinguish individual tracks which, in any case, bear minute and second timings rather than descriptive names. [30]  snd retain the melodic motifs of house but as ghostly traces that meld with the precise digital effects.  In this respect the music also serves as an implicit critique of the widespread assumption that digital production and organic warmth are incompatible. FN

In conclusion then, what can be said of the body of work and practices associated with the label and thus with the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari?  It should be stressed first that there are a wide diversity of styles and producers on the label and that not all of them are aware of, much less consciously, basing their work on theory.  However the theory provided the direct stimulus to the establishment of the label as a zone in which experimentation is possible and I would argue that it is possible to read the original theory retrospectively through the more ambitious of these works.  Therefore it can be argued that theory itself has a suppressed aesthetic potential and that this mode of music does reconstitute theory as a sensory and even sensual audio experience.  This throws into question conceptual divisions between the theoretical and the sensual or the avant-garde and the popular.  

This conclusion leads to a wider point.  Even in cases where a philosophical framework is less apparent, music analysis can gain much from an understanding of the philosophical or conceptual contexts that inform or inspire production.  It should also be stressed that the practices here are not exclusive to this label, rather this label is one of the longest established in an emergent network of labels producing new forms of electronic music.  The label increasingly plays a curatorial role, featuring the work of artists from smaller labels alongside those of its regular producers.  If, then, Mille Plateaux has made significant aesthetic and philosophical interventions, is it likely to be able to continue to do so?  Now approaching its 100th release the label may seem to be in danger of 'territorialization' – in other words, of becoming ossified and predictable or of remaining 'stuck' in an esoteric schizoid flux.  Not all the releases are equally successful or impressive, but the deterritorialization process is continuing and has led to the recent establishment of a further sub-label, Ritornell ('refrain', another much used Deleuzoguattarian motif).  Ritornell releases are issued in generic, minimal sleeves and have a self-consciously experimental aura.  The establishment of Ritornell shows how the interface of Deleuzoguattarian terminology with technological and stylistic developments constantly inspires new terminological and stylistic mutations.  A 'typical' Ritornell release is Achim Wollscheid's 'Airs', a live recording of a German radio programme in which Wollscheid mixes from 5 CD players, creating fresh sound assemblages from fragments of the work of Mille Plateaux and other artists.  The aim may be a future of perpetual deterritorialization, yet in practice the longer the label works, the greater the dangers of institutionalisation.  However it does seem likely that, at the level of individual releases or even within individual tracks, deterritorialization is likely to be taken to its conceptual and technological limits, and there may still be significant scope for this process to continue.

Footnotes

1  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux (London: Athlone Press, 1996), 343. Back
2  Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989). See also the Deleuze and Guattari page at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/d-g_html/
3  Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 159.
4  Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 161. Back
5  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, 343.
6  Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 135. Back
7  Ronald Bogue, 'Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force', in Patton, P. (Ed.), The Deleuze Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Back
8  Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 105. Back
9  Achim Sczepanski, Music 1995, in Rauschen 10 Sleevenotes, (Frankfurt: Force Inc. Records, 1995).  
10  Real audio extracts of releases on Force Inc., Mille Plateux and associated labels can be heard on the label website www.force-inc.com  The labels' press releases are reproduced in the catalogue of the online record store at www.forcedexposure.com Back
11  Alternative formulations for the microaesthetic-micropolitical praxis described above.
12  Sczepanski, Music 1995. Back
13  Other labels associated with the style include Vienna's Mego and London's Touch. Back
14  See particularly the albums Systemisch and 94 Diskont (Mille Plateaux). Back
15  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateux, 95. Back
16  Mille Plateaux MP22 (1996). Back
17  The label is known for an extremely confrontational and politicised blend of punk, jungle and Gabber elements.
18  The key works from his Mille Plateaux period are brought together on the triple CD set The Geist of Alec Empire (Berlin: Geist, 1998). Back
19  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, 95.
20  Gas, '1912', from the double compilation Modulation and Transformation 3 (Mille Plateaux MP43).
21  Such divisions were critcised by Marcuse in the introduction to Eros and Civilization, which speaks of 'the fierce and often methodical and conscious separation of the instinctual from the intellectual sphere, of pleasure from thought.'  See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (New York: The Beacon Press, 1962), x.
22  Curd Duca, Switched-on Wagner Minimalistic Mood Music (Mille Plateaux MP31, 1996).
23  Curd Duca, 'Touch' from the triple compilation Modulation & Transformation IV (Mille Plateaux MP61, 1999). Back
24  Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 113.
25  For an explanation of the speed of genre and sub-genre formation see my paper 'Thinking About Mutation: Genres in Nineties Electronica' in Ed. Blake, A., Living Through Pop (London: Routledge, 1999), 146-158.
26  The title of the most recent label compilation (Mille Plateaux MP79).  One of the most interesting tracks is 'Loads early like normal' by the young US producer Kit Clayton.  This plays with the house formula, taking its typical motifs and grinding and scouring them into a violent cycle of deferral that slowly emerges into a more serene atmosphere. Back
27  Blue Byte, 'Divine 8', Modulation and Transformation III (1998). Back
28  Arno Peeters, Aeroson (Mille Plateaux MP38).
29  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, 343. Back
30  snd makecassette (Mille Plateaux MP69, 1999). Back

A version of this paper was presented as part of the Theory and Analysis Graduate Study (TAGS) Day held at King's College, London on Saturday 27 May 2000.

© Alexei Monroe, 2001

BPM Volume 4