The Frankfurt label that turned Deleuze into a release schedule and made glitch a coherent language, at the electronic edge of the archive.
Mille Plateaux is the German electronic label I keep at Tier III, as an adjacent imprint at the edge of its remit. Achim Szepanski founded it in Frankfurt in 1994 as a sublabel of his Force Inc., and named it after Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, applying the rhizome as an actual operating principle: release forward-thinking electronic music from as many contexts as possible and let the connections form themselves. It is the same philosophical source Sub Rosa drew on, used here for the dancefloor.
The label's lasting mark is glitch. The Clicks & Cuts series, begun in 2000, gathered the aestheticised digital error, the click, the cut, the dropout, into a coherent electronic language, and is generally treated as the genre's cornerstone. The roster ran through Oval, Vladislav Delay, snd, Alva Noto and many more.
Szepanski's ties to the archive's world are real: before the label he had brought Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans, Psychic TV and Laibach to Wiesbaden as a promoter. The label folded in 2004 when its distributor collapsed, and he reactivated it in 2018.
My reading. Mille Plateaux is at Tier III as a foundational glitch label at the electronic edge of the catalogue.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene