Achim Szepanski, the radical German author and philosopher who founded several electronic and ambient music labels, including Mille Plateaux and Force Inc., has died, Force Inc. wrote on Instagram. His colleague Lain Iwakura said he was found dead on Wednesday, September 25. Szepanski was 67 years old.
Szepanski, a Marxist thinker in the Frankfurt School lineage and a devout club-goer in his Frankfurt hometown, grew up in the post-punk scene before releasing techno records in the 1980s on his Blackout label. He founded Force Inc., in 1991, to explore more forward techno and hardcore sounds, including early works by now-canonized producers like Mike Ink and Alec Empire. He soon decided, however, that “innovative techno, from acid to breakbeat, was a too closed frame for electronic music.” Record labels, in his view, were a form of praxis, held to rigorous moral and conceptual standards.
As well as the heavier Riot Beats label, Szepanski laid the foundations for Mille Plateaux in 1993, partly in response to what he called rave’s “commodification—the order of spaces and control factors [that] started 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 name from Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari’s book Thousand Plateaus, Mille Plateaux released an array of musical styles perhaps best exemplified by the glitch aesthetic—termed “clicks + cuts” in the label’s parlance—of which Gilles Delueze, by then nearly 70, became a fan, shortly before his death by suicide. Mille Plateaux became Szepanski’s most enduring success, putting out one landmark album after another by electronic trailblazers including Gas, Oval, Cristian Vogel, Frank Bretschneider, and Vladislav Delay before its dissolution in 2004.
Szepanski sold Mille Plateaux to the musician and entrepreneur Marcus Gabler, who advocated for slightly more accessible releases, stoking controversy among the label’s loyalists. When they had last met, Gabler said in 2010, Szepanski “told me he was out of the music business and didn’t even turn on his stereo for months. I tried to get some feedback about our forthcoming releases from him, but apparently he wasn’t interested.”
Szepanski continued to prolifically publish books and articles of anti-fascist philosophy, on subjects such as nothingness, emptiness, and nihilism, often via his Non-Copyriot website. He eventually retook control of Mille Plateaux, and, in recent years, released some of his favorite albums on the label, including Thomas Köner’s Motus and Simona Zamboli’s Ethernity.
