It's that melancholy time of life when every so often you wonder, "who's going to be next out of my contemporaries, all the people I've known, to go?".
Today's answer is Achim Szepanski, founder of Mille Plateaux and its sister-labels Force Inc and Riot Beats (to name just a few).
Through these imprints Achim put out so many cool records between the early '90s and early 2000s - artists like Oval, Gas, Porter Ricks / Thomas Koner, Curd Duca, Biochip C, Alec Empire, Panacea, Cristian Vogel, Microstoria, Vladislav Delay, Alva Noto, the Clicks and Cuts compilations, In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze .... on and on and on. Encompassing a stunningly diverse sonic spectrum, these records often came with release-rationales and theory-framing attached that were genuinely provocative and thought-provoking - conceptronica when it was a new thing, a refreshingly unusual approach, before rigor became de rigeur.
In recent years, Achim had been writing and publishing books prolifically. There was also a short book of Szepanski interviews from the mid-90s, including my 1996 Mille Plateaux feature for The Wire and another by Katja Diefenbach.
Fond memories of hanging out with Achim when spending a couple of days in Frankfurt to do that feature (see below - along with a review of the Deleuze tribute Achim curated). He liked to talk theory and he liked a drink. A bunch of us took the 30-minute train ride to Mainz to visit a club tucked away inside the foundations of a bridge that spanned the Rhine. Gene Farris from Relief / Cajual played a fabulous set, I heard tracks like "Flash" by Green Velvet for the first time. Things got very merry. I picture Achim in the throng waving a bottle in one fist and shouting, "Gene Farris is the best house deejay in the world!!!!".
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MILLE PLATEAUX
The Wire
April 1996
by Simon Reynolds
Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany's financial capital and a longstanding centre of anti-capitalist theory. Most famously, it gave the world the 'Frankfurt School' of Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al: neo-Marxist thinkers who fled Nazism and landed up in Southern California, where their eyes and ears were affronted by the kitsch outpourings of Hollywood's dream-factory.
Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered for its snooty attitude towards popular culture, which it regarded as a soul-degrading inferior to High Modernism, and as the 20th Century's opiate-of-the-people. Adorno, in particular, has achieved a dubious immortality in the cultural studies world, as an Aunt Sally figure ritually bashed by academics as a prequel to their semiotic readings of "anti-hegemonic resistance" encoded in Madonna videos and 'Star Trek'.
There's no denying Adorno deserves derision for his infamously suspect comments about the "eunuch-like sound" of jazz, whose secret message was "give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated...and you will be accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you". But in other respects Adorno's critique of pop culture's role as safety valve and social control is not so easily shrugged off.
Witness these remarks from his essay "On The Fetish Character in and the Music and Regression of Listening": "Their ecstasy is without content... It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals". Adorno's verdict on the swing inspired frenzies of the 'jitterbug'--"merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence"--could easily be transposed to '90s rave culture, which--from happy hardcore to gabba to Goa trance--is now as rigidly ritualised and conservative as heavy metal.
Mille Plateaux shares something of Adorno's oppositional attitude to mass culture. For label boss Achim Szepanski, Germany's rave industry--which dominates the pop mainstream--is so institutionalised and regulated it verges on totalitarian. Adorno-style, he psychoanalyses Ecstasy culture as "a metonymic search for mother-substitutes (Ecstasy can be your new mommy)". Alec Empire, a Mille solo artist and prime mover in his own Berlin-based anti-rave scene Digital Hardcore, is more blunt: "rave is dead, it's boring! House is disco and techno is progressive rock". As for Oval, Mille Plateaux's 'star act'... When asked about their relationship to techno, they simply reply: "Relationship?!"
Influenced by post-structuralist theory and named after a gargantuan tract by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux release deconstruction techno. Situating their activity both within and against the genre conventions of post-rave styles like electronica, house, jungle and trip hop, Mille Plateaux point out these musics' premature closures and seize their missed opportunities. The results may not offer the easy satisfactions of less ambitious techno labels/auteurs, but they do constitute the most consistently stimulating catalogue in the post-rave universe.
I meet Szepanski at his apartment, which doubles as HQ for his four labels (Force Inc, Mille, Riot Beats and Force Inc USA), and is located in Frankfurt's sleazy equivalent to King's Cross (handy for trains, lots of junkies and hookers). Having read his Deleuze-style press releases (lots of "sound-streams" and "disjunctivesingularities") and conducted a theory-dense E-mail conversation, I'm expecting a rather severe individual. But over the course of the weekend, Achim reveals some unexpected sides to his character: a dry sense of humour, a soft spot for plastic pop (he confesses to buying CDs by TLC and Kylie) and an awesome talent for piss-artistry.
Plagued by a mystery ailment, he spends most of Saturday sipping homeopathic remedies and complaining that he's too poorly to undertake a planned excursion to see Chicago house DJ/Force Inc artiste Gene Farris spin at a club in nearby Mainz. At midnight, he decides he's just about up to it. For the first five hours, Achim's spirits remain low, despite an alcohol intake rate of three beers to my one:
But by 6AM and the magic number Beer #12, Achim can be found flailing on the dancefloor, enraptured by Farris's trippy set. Every three minutes, he accosts someone to blearily proclaim: 'Gene Farris is the best house deejay in THE WORLD, I don't care, I will tell anyone--Josh Wink, Laurent Garnier--to their face, Farris is the BEST".
* * * * * *
Now aged 35, Szepanski got involved in student politics in the radical, post-1968 climate of the mid-'70s. He read Marx, flirted with Maoism, protested conditions in the German prison system. Later in the decade, he immersed himself in the post-punk experimentalist scene alongside the likes of D.A.F., playing in the industrial band P16D4. In the '80s he went back to college, watched the Left die and got very depressed, consoling himself with alcohol and the misanthropic philosophy of Cioran.
Two late '80s breakthroughs pulled him out the mire: his encounter with the post-structuralist thought of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, et al, and his excitement about hip hop and house. While still working on a doctorate about Foucault, he started the first DJ-oriented record store in Frankfurt and founded the Blackout label. By the early '90s, Szepanski was tripping out to Deleuze & Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia", a colossal tome that Foucault hailed as "an introduction to the non-fascist life".
For Achim, the experience was revelatory and galvanising, because Deleuze & Guattari's theories showed him "that you don't have to be negative or sad if you want to be militant, even if what you fight against is very bad. The Frankfurt School and Marxism has a very linear interpretation of history and a totalising view of society, whereas Deleuze & Guattari say that society is more than just the economy and the state, it's a multitude of sub-systems, and local struggles."
From this, Achim conceived the strategy of context-based subversion which informs his labels: hard-techno and house with Force Inc, electronica with Mille Plateaux, jungle with Riot Beats, trip hop with the "Electric Ladyland" compilation. These interventions are somewhere between parody and riposte, demonstrating by deed not discourse what these genres could really be like if they lived up to or exceeded their accompanying 'progressive' rhetoric.
Founded in 1991, Force Inc was initially influenced by Detroit renegades Underground Resistance: not just sonically, but by "their whole anti-corporate, anti-commodification of dance stance". In its first year, Force Inc's neo-Detroit/nouveau aciiied sound had a lot of impact. At the same time, the Force crew were involved in the underground party scene, organising "guerrilla events at strange locations, without all the tricks and special effects that you get at normal discos". But as the aciiied revival took off and trance tedium took over in 1992, Force Inc "made a radical break," towards a breakbeat-oriented hardcore that weirdly parallelled the proto-jungle emerging in Britain.
Szepanski & Co deserve massive respect for recognising so precociously the radicalism of the then universally deplored 'ardkore. They even loved the much derided sped-up 'squeaky voice' tracks that ruled in 1992.
"Maybe it was just our peculiar warped interpretation, but the sped-up vocals sounded like a serious attempt to deconstruct some of the ideologies of pop music. One dimension to this was using voices like instruments or noise, destroying the pop ideology that says that the voice is the expression of the human subject."
And so Force Inc embarked upon its own "abstract industrial take on UK breakbeat", mashing together harsh sonorities and angelic samples over ultra-fast breakbeats, as on Biochip C's marvellous "Hells Bells", available on the recent Force anthology "Rauschen 10". Achim also licensed UK tracks like NRG's super-sentimental "I Need Your Lovin'" and stuff by Force Mass Motion. "We did some great parties, our DJ friend Sasha playing much faster than the English DJ's, at 200 bpm, using an altered Technics cranked up to + 40. At this velocity, it 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 like Westbam and Marusha, and the music channel Viva TV. The charts were swamped with Low Spirit pop-tekno smashes like '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 middlebrow trance, as represented by Frankfurt's own Sven Vath and his Harthouse label.
For Achim, what happened to German rave illlustrated Deleuze & Guattari's concepts of 'deterritorialisation' and 'reterritorialisation'. Deterritorialisation is when a culture gets all fluxed up--punk, early rave, jungle--resulting in a breakthrough into new aesthetic, social and cognitive spaces. Re-territorialisation 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: 'freizeitknast', a 'pleasure-prison'. Regulated experiences, punctual rapture, predictable music. "Boring!".
Would he go so far as to see kind of aesthetic fascism at work in rave culture? "The techniques of mass-mobilisation and crowd- consciousness have similarities to fascism. Fascism was mobilising people for the war-machines, rave is mobilising people for pleasure-machines...".
In 1994, Achim started Mille Plateaux. Just as Force Inc worked with and against the demands of the dancefloor, Mille is a kind of answer to 'electronic listening music' and the ambient boom. Achim sees Mille Plateaux output as the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory, fleshing out concepts such as the rhizome (a network of stems that are laterally connected), which is opposed to hierarchical root-systems like trees. In music, 'rhizomatic' equates with the Eno/dub idea of a democracy of sounds, a dismantling of the normal ranking of instruments in the mix (usually privileging the voice or lead guitar). Instead, says Achim, there's a "synthesisation of heterogenous sounds and material through a kind of composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their heterogeneity".
Anticipated by the fractal funk and chaos theorems of Can and early '70s Miles (the 'nobody solos and everybody solos' principle), rhizomatic music today takes the form of DJ cut'n'mix (at its rare, daring best), avant-garde hip hop and post-rock. Oh, and the output of Mille Plateaux, of course!
Another key Deleuze & Guattari trait shared by Mille Plateaux is an interest in schizophrenic consciousness. Achim talks of admiring darkside hardcore for its "paranoia", and mourning the way jungle traded its vital madness for "serious" musicality. "Since the Fifties, in musique concrete, in industrial music, in techno, one heard diverse noises, screaming, creaking, hissing--all noises one related more to madness. Echo-effects allow sound hallucinations to occur, they delocalise the perception apparatus, allowing forms of perception to emerge that one had previously attributed to lunatics or schizophrenics". For Achim as for Deleuze & Guattari, such sensory disorientation is valuable, acting as a deconstruction of "subjectivity".
Last year, Szepanski contacted Deleuze himself, sending material by Oval and other Mille artists, and asking if he'd write an essay for Achim's planned anthology of techno theory, 'Maschinelle Strategeme'. The great man wrote back saying he couldn't do it, but gave his blessing to the label, and said that he particularly dug Oval. "He even wrote about specific tracks! Later, the German publisher of 'A Thousand Plateaux' told us this was really quite unusual, to get such a letter."
Not long after, the terminally ill, 70 year old Deleuze committed suicide. Szepanski immediately organised the double-CD tribute "In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze". Featuring contributions from American post-rockers Rome and Trans Am, DJ-philosopher Spooky, a gaggle of Achim's old allies in the European experimental music scene, and all the usual Mille Plateaux affiliated suspects (Oval, Mouse On Mars, Cristian Vogel, Ian Pooley, Scanner, Gas, etc), "In Memoriam" is probably the best thing the label's put out yet. Stand-outs include the electro-acoustic jiggery-pokery of Alec Empire's "Bon Voyage", the musique concrete jungle of Christophe Charles' "Undirections/Continuum", and Rome's Cluster-like drone- mosaic "Intermodal".
The ubiquitous Jim O'Rourke also appears, and is working on a sort of O'Rourke Vs Mille Plateaux remix project, using the entire Mille catalogue as source material. Techno-Animal may also be doing a remix project based around the 'versus' concept, "Techno-Animal Vs Reality", which will involve five guest collaborators; material will be shuttled back and forth between each artist and the band, eventually resulting in ten versions of five tracks. And then there's Oval, who are currently scheming their way towards a sort of Listener Vs. Oval scenario: a digital authoring-system that will enable the punter to make their own Oval records.
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Interviewing Oval is, shall we say, challenging. Their methods are obscure, their theory fabulously rarified, 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 an uncanny, seductive beauty of treacherous surfaces and labyrinthine recesses.
Ironically, given Oval's polemical engagement with digital culture, our encounter takes place in one of Frankfurt's new cyber-cafes. Immediately, there are communication problems. Humble enquires about backgrounds and influences are met with rolling of the eyes, sniggers, and 'next question!'. Tentative characterisations of their activity are treated as a reduction or misrepresentaiton of the Oval project. So what ARE they trying to do?
Put as simply as possible, Oval is "not so much about music as the technical implementation of notions of music", says Markus Popp. "It's an effort in sound-design rather than music with a capital M. The main content of our effort is to have an audible user-interface."
In nuts and bolts terms, this means fucking with the hardware and software that organises and enables today's post-rave electronica. Most critical of these technologies is is MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows different pieces of equipment to be co-ordinated like the players in a band, or instrumental 'voices' in an orchestra. For Oval, this is precisely the problem. "MIDI is basically a music-metaphor in itself, one that's so deplorably dated. It's so constraining in every way, you have to go beyond these protocols".
Despite, or rather because of, this technology's reliance on "traditional music syntax and semantics", Oval deliberately use the set-up, because their real interest is in standardisation. Their first Mille Plateaux release 'Systemisch', says Sebastian Oschatz, "was done with a very cheap MIDI set-up and a borrowed copy of Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Vol II". This later turns out to be an Oval in-joke; apparently, Richard James is one of many artists who've claimed that 'Systemisch' was based on his material. "That album is composed of material that is really old, and it got edited, layered and recombined so many times, it's stupid to ask 'whose music is this?'," says Popp. "That is the only truly negligible aspect in our music. Most of the CDs we used were rented, and often they didn't have their covers!"
Going back to MIDI and sampler/sequencer software like Cubase, Popp compains: "There is so much determinism within these programmes, working with them involves so much compliance to principles that are highly critical. In a social context, these technologies are mostly used in a controlling way: monitoring the workplace, workplace efficiency, optimising the user-interface. On-line newsgroups are full of people who E-mail back to the manufacturers saying 'we'll need this, change that', and all of this keeps them in front of their computers even longer. Our way of dealing with this is to overcome the manufacturer's distinction between 'features' and 'bugs'".
Which brings us to the famous Oval deployment of deliberately damaged CD's to generate the raw material of their music: the glitches, skips, and distressed cyber-muzik that makes 'Systemisch' and its sequel '94 Diskont' so ear-boggling. The CD-thang is another 'reduction' that irks Oval: "we did use CD's, but that is neglectable, there are so many other things we could have used... The important point was that the CD-player has no distinction if it's an error or a proper part of the recording, it's just doing calculations, algorhythms."
This recalls, say, Hendrix's aestheticisation of feedback, a 'bug' or improper effect immanent in the electric guitar but hitherto un-exploited. Oval reject terms like 'sabotage' to describe the CD-treaments and the more esoteric forms of algorhythmic mischief they wreak within hardware. But they do use the word 'disobedience', which also has a frisson of subversion.
Perhaps the closest term to describe Oval's methods is deconstruction, at least in its precise original meaning: Derrida & Co's close, rigorous reading of philosophical texts in order to unsettle the terms of post-Enlightenment thought from within. Deconstruction involved unravelling the rhetorical tropes and purely literary sleights that compose any text's supposedly rational argument; it meant exposing the text's blindspots, paradoxes and hidden complicities. Oval similarly talk of engaging in a kind of non-antagonistic dialogue with corporate digital culture, with Sony, IBM, Microsoft, et al.
Contradictions abound in Oval's own rhetoric. They speak in almost punk anyone-can-do-it terms of deliberately keeping their activity at the "lowest entry-level", of not wanting "to convey an image of arcane technology and years of expert study in digital signal processing and programming". Yet their discourse is often absurdly forbidding and user-unfriendly. Then there's the way they deny any musical intentions, only to later come close to characterising their project as an enrichment of music. They talk of not wanting to produce a merely "predictable outcome" of the hardware and software, of wishing to "offensively suggest" the existence of soundworlds "from 'outside' the digital domain", of having invented a "completely new music-paradigm."
Says Popp, "Another aspect of what we wanted to achieve musically is to generate a new kind of perception. In the beginning, some labels sent back the demo tapes because they said 'there's no music on it'!". In that respect, Oval's audio-mazes induce a 'perceptual dissonance' akin to the Op- Art of Bridget Reilly, or the perspectival chaos of Escher. Sebastian adds: "it works the other way: obvious mis-pressings on the albums, or DAT drop-outs on certain compilation tracks, don't get spotted during the production process!"
Future Oval projects include some kind of EP for Mille Plateaux; the US release of 'Systemisch' and 'Diskont', accompanied by "exclusive material, possibly predating 'Systemisch'," via ultra-kool label Table of the Elements; an 'interactive' product designed in collaboration with British computer boffin Richard Ross.
"It's not exactly CD-ROM or hypertext", explains Popp. "But it will involve guiding the user through some kind of design-environment, and basically enabling people to do Oval records themselves. The working title is 'The Public Domain Project', and it will involve a lot of work. We also want to investigate the forthcoming video-disc, maybe there are ways to work with the combination of optical and audio, new potentials. And we are thinking about using the sounds of data processing itself--the sounds the computer or sampler generate when they calculate or process the sound. For there is always sound somewhere in the mixing desk, when stuff is stored or window-boxes get closed or opened. We are thinking of recording this because it is basically the sound of the user-interface itself."
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At the other extreme from Oval's oblique strategies lies Alec Empire's insurrectionary anarcho-tekno. Empire and the Oval boys appear to have had some sort of ideological rift, in fact. Popp refuses to comment, but Empire makes a veiled jibe about Oval doing "their music from this very intense theory, whereas I do it not only from books but from what I feel."
An engaging fellow who's constantly laughing, usually at his own utterances, Alec Empire divides his energy between recording solo albums for Mille Plateaux (the sombre electronica of "Low On Ice", the zany Sun Ra meets Perrez Prado avant-EZ-listening of "Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5"), and fostering the Berlin-based Digital Hardcore scene. This two-pronged campaign reflects Empire's interestingly jumbled background. On one hand, he studied music theory for a while and, unusually for a techno artist, uses notation when composing his own music. On the other hand, he was a breakdancer at the age of 10 and playing in a punk band by the time he was 12.
At the end of the '80s, Empire got swept up in Berlin's underground party scene. Despite being anti-drugs himself, Empire embraced aciiied's cult of oblivion. "For a lot of people at the acid parties, it was about escaping from reality. At the time it made sense, politics seemed futile, with the Left dead, and even the autonomists seeming like silly kids rioting for fun". The German scene quickly turned dark and nihilistic: "People got into heroin and speed, there were parties in East Berlin with this very hard industrial acid sound, Underground Resistance and Plus 8, 150 b.p.m.".
Empire dug the way this aggressive sound reflected the kids' frustration, and, influenced by the abstract militancy of Underground Resistance, he formed the agit-tekno band Atari Teenage Riot. Atari signed to a major label, but were dropped before they released an album. Wrecking a recording studio's amplifier and running up huge cab bills by stopping off at record stores, they were just too much trouble.
By this point--the end of '93--Alec had already released around 15 EP's of solo material on Force Inc and other labels, including "Hunt Down The Nazis" and "SuEcide". Meanwhile, he was experimenting with a Germanic jungle sound for Riot Beats, drawing on the influence of UK 'darkside' tracks by Bizzy B and the Reinforced crews.Darkcore remains an influence on Digital Hardcore, which is both a scene and a label. "Our beat are fast and distorted, but the programming is not as complex as the UK producers."
Ironically, Empire now reckons that UK jungle has gotten too funky. "The energy is missing. I don't care about them taking Detroit strings, 'cos I like Detroit, but jungle is just not forceful enough, and a whole night of it is just too flat.
The idea of mixing, of fading tracks into each other smoothly, is over-rated. Pirate radio was better before the DJ's learned to mix properly. DJ technique is just like a guitarist who knows how to make a really complicated guitar solo. A Stooges riff can mean much more, with just three notes. If the energy's not there, what's the point?"
With its speedfreak tempos and brutalist noise aesthetic, Digital Hardcore has less in common with jungle than it does with that other descendant of the original 1991 pan-European hardcore: the terror-gabba and speedcore sounds of labels like PCP, Kotzaak, Fischkopf, Cross Fade Entertainment, Praxis and Gangstar Toons Industry (many of whom can be found on the Empire-compiled "Capital Noise Chapter 1" CD). DHR's own acts, like EC80R, Moonraker, Killout Trash and Sonic Subjunkies, mash up 200 bpm breaks, ultra-gabba riffs, thrash-metal guitar, Riot Grrl shouting, and loads of midfrequency NOISE. "In techno, in jungle, the middle frequencies are taken out, it's all bass and treble. But the middle frequencies are the rock guitar frequencies, it's where the aggression comes from."
As well as 'boost the midrange, cut the bass', Digital Hardcore's other key precepts are 'tempo changes keep it exciting' and 'faceless techno PA's are boring'. At their parties, DJ's favour a crush-collision mess-thetic of mixed up styles and b.p,m's, and there are always bands playing. Instead of hypnotising the listener into a headnodding stupor, Digital Hardcore is meant to be a wake-up call.
So if rave is heavy metal (rowdy, stupefying) and electronica is progressive rock (pseudo-spiritual, contemplative), does that mean Digital Hardcore (angry, speedy, 'noise-annoys'-y) is punk rock? "The only similarity with punk is the frustration. And that's also where our stuff differs from Mille Plateaux: it's less theoretical, and perhaps more negative. All the kids are into chaos and anarchy, because nothing else seems to work.
"You know, there's this foundation of musicians who used to play at parties and have now been put out of business by DJ's, " laughs Empire, "German Rock Musicians Against Techno, and we want to join it." He adds, "Just to take the piss", but, y'know--I think he means it, man.
One of my fave things Mille Plateaux put out
It's everything you want it to be and it's GAS
I really liked this guy Christophe Charles's track on In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze
A-maze-ment
PORTER RICKS,
live at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage
Village Voice, Tuesday, Jul 3 2001
by Simon Reynolds
No doubt about it, the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage is an amazing space. As a music venue, though, this gloomy maze of looming, steep-sided chambers leaves a lot to be desired: Performers tend to drown in a quagmire of reflected sound. On June 28, the final installment of Creative Time's annual series of avant-electronica events (a 10th birthday bash for Frankfurt's Force Inc and its sister label, Mille Plateaux) saw some groups faring better with the acoustics than others. Panacea's 180-b.p.m. Gothkore bombast suited the medieval ambience, but Kid606's set was too busy and event-crammed (Boredoms do IDM) to thrive in this catacomb. SND suffered from the opposite syndrome: Too sparse even for the Anchorage, they sounded like an ailing metronome trapped in an echo chamber.
Luckily, Porter Ricks fit the space like a glove. Thomas Köner and Andy Mellweg first came to acclaim with their late-'90s releases on Chain Reaction, Berlin's "heroin house" label. Combining Köner's texturology (he's an avant-garde composer renowned for bleak arctic dronescapes) with Mellweg's grasp of house's pump-and-pound rhythm, Porter Ricks make formlessness funky.
But that's no preparation for how hard they rocked tonight: Imagine Eno's On Land meets the Stooges. Porter Ricks use a guitar processor on all their synth sounds, which helps explains the added grit in their grind. Early in the set, the songs felt like spelunking through spongy-walled caverns flushed with foamy water: total body-massage. But as the beat got steadily more bangin' and the texture-riffs flared fierce like magnesium, Porter Ricks hit a sublime pitch midway between warm pulse and cold rush: a sound as visceral as hardcore, as sensuous as deep house, as abstract as glitch. The combination of this glorious roar and the Anchorage's architecture was like being teleported through time-space to Berlin's legendary early-'90s club E-Werk, a disused power plant. Finally, the Anchorage became the rave temple it has always promised to be.
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