The ultra-blackness manifesto: a
Deleuzian reading of the philosophical and socio-political stakes of the current
electronic music scene (publication marking the reactivation of the influential label Mille Plateaux, with texts by an ensemble of international musicians, artists and theorists:
Frédéric Neyrat,
Achim Szepanski, Holger Schulze, Gerriet K. Sharma, Bernd Herzogenrath, Corry Shores,
Marcus Schmickler, Thomas Brinkmann,
Thomas Köner...).
Ultrablack of Music speculates on the manifold ways in which the objective, inhuman soundworlds, which roar underneath humans' sensological apparatus, pervade and smoothly colonize our humanoid-alien, affective and cognitive capacities—and how to construct ways out of the mess of the Master Rhythms of Sonic Thanaticist Capital and its stratagems of annihilation and pulpification.
Speculative rhythm productions drive the mathematical ope-rationality and its decisional self-amputations to the edge and create the missing corporeality that rewires our affective capacities and inhibitions by un-mooring, alienating/de-realizing our relations to the killing abstractions (reductive Binarism, identitism/autism), the techgnostical mindset and its mystifications.
Ultrablackened music confronts and pushes us also into the experimentation with this nameless in-between, in which new temporalities can emerge whose winding paths and outcomes can neither be predicted nor guaranteed.
Its cruel love vigorously informed and fueled by the hate in ending this world, as we know and sonically experience it.
The book includes a compilation, which can be downloaded, with tracks from
Automatisme,
Thomas Köner, B Ashra, Bienoise, bpmf, SIFIR, echonaut, EPS, Marcel Daemgen, Mijk van Dijk, Khem One, Solar Debris, Grupo Coral a Voz do Alentejo na Quinta do Conde feat Dr Walker, Dr. W, Dr. NoiseM, omsk information & dr walker, stine m, svensyntetics, NicoNote, Pavel Zhagun,
Schmickler Rohrhuber, Somnambule, Stefan Paulus, The Allegorist, Thomas Brinkmann, Bill B. Wintermute, DJ Durbin, Gerriet K. Sharma, Antonia Manhartsberger, Siegfried Kärcher, Woulg, Zoy Winterstein.
Achim Szepanski (1957-2024) was a member of the German experimental noise band P.D. in 1980, and then P16.D4 in 1982. He was the founder of the legendary and highly influential electronic music labels Force Inc. (1991) and
Mille Plateaux (1993), pushing the boundaries of techno and experimental music. he has also worked as an author and lecturer, mainly on philosophy topics. His research focused lately primarly on Speculative Capital. His last publications are
Capitalisation 1 & 2,
Non-Marxism,
Capital and Power in the 21th Century, and
Imperialism, State-Fascism and the War Machines of Capital. He was the editor of
NON.
2nd edition (2023).
