★Mille Plateaux
Slices of Life
"During the 22nd of February 2022, two years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we took audio snippets from our everyday lives documenting our homes and surrounding urban environments, our intellectual interests and our musical tastes. We also gathered pictures with our phones. Some of the audio sources were processed, some were not. Here you get slices of our lives from two different cities, New York and Berlin – a glimpse of the fragmentation of our times through a broken sonic diar…
Statique
Statique is the fifth full length album on Mille Plateaux and Force Inc. labels by Automatisme (the Canadian musician and conceptual artist William Jourdain active since 2011). Jourdain met the label owner Achim Szepanski in 2019 and did an album in solo (Alter-, Mille Plateaux, 2020) plus four others in collaborations (with iadema, Beyond Humans, Stefan Paulus and Viatorism in duo with Pheek).Automatisme now returns as a solo act on that label. The results are, on one side, an expanded vision o…
Messier87
Ibrahim Alfa Jnr released techno music since the age of 17. He started to play piano when was six years old and has a master degree in sonic arts. As a Live Act and DJ he is world wide known.
Daikan
'The Earth is burning, covering all environments in ashes. Smoke comes to us from computers-from social networks accelerating the spread of burnt affects, damaging our ability to feel and respond to what the planet strives to express. We need to cool down. Thomas Köner's music can help change the pace of our perceptions: 1) In Daikan (2002) - a Japanese term meaning "the coldest" or "the coldest part of the year"-the ear stretches until touching the depth of time that persists in the ice; a soni…
Ethernity
Simona Zambolis first album on Mille Plateaux "Ethernity" is a piece of haunting music - vibrating, pulsing and cutting through the concrete and the chaos at the same time, when you listen close enough. The album is a journey through trans-reality, not only as a melancholic drama, but also as a travel to alien worlds, hence as a necessity of an electronic intervention. "Ethernithy" is radical fictioning in a non-expressive, non-melancholic and ultrablack sense. Profound music demands blackness, …
Nuuk
** 2021 Reissue ** Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. Alongside Wolfgang Voigt’s “Gas” project, Köner has been centrally responsible for electronic music’s fascination with depth and reduction. His signature sound is vast, seemingly endless, which at first seems homogenous and infinite, but once exposed to it, when our senses calibrate to the fine nuances of changes, we discover and immerse into abundance of textures, richness of modulations and almost infin…
Biokinetics - 25th Anniversary
** 2021 Reissue **Techno isn't a genre that has birthed many classic albums, and the dub techno subgenre even less so, but one indisputable classic is Porter Ricks' debut Biokinetics. Originally issued on the legendary Basic Channel sub-label Chain Reaction in 1996 following a trio of 12"s, Biokinetics was the first of the label's album releases, and still stands as its crowning achievement. The duo was made up of dark ambient pioneer Thomas Köner and sound engineer Andy Mellwig, and between the…
Porter Ricks
Porter Ricks is a collaboration between Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig. After the Re-release of the legendary album “Biokinetics", which is superb subaquatic dub techno, we re-release Porter Ricks first album on Mille Plateaux. The album demonstrates the move to a kind of discoid funkyness with an underlying almost organic rhythmight. But still its not music for beautiful souls. Instead, it combines funkyness with alien sonic fluxes and the rhythm of a killing mover.
Aubrite
Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. His music is often defined as dark ambient or drone, because of the use of low frequencies, material from gongs,shadowy resonances and boreal ambience, but at the same time its sound with constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, what makes it organic, human and almost comforting. Köners soundscapes are no longer simply dark, the question now is that of a profound blackness. Such is the generic darkness of the…
Downfall
Limited 2 LP edition. Downfall is the first album under the name Saito created by Lena Saito, aka Galcid, and produced by accomplished analog synthesizer guru, Hisashi Saito, aka Lena's husband. Having descended from a long line of Japanese sword-smiths, the industrial sound of smashing steel is embedded in Lena's DNA and reflected in her music, however there are also refined, hypnotic tones showing a side with more finesse. The music itself is not scored and is predominantly improvised. Words a…
Alter
Limited 2 LP edition. "Alter-" is Automatisme's reaction to altermodernism in sound art. "For the Automatisme - Alter- album. I am inspired by how the art historian Nicolas Bourriaud defines the Altermodernism. Bourriaud understands the term "Alter" as a way to mean "other". The altermodernism would be another modernity that is different from the avant-garde modernism and post-modernism. More precisely, this is a new paradigm from the XXIe century with alternative ways to motivate artists to be…
Motus
Limited 2 LP edition. Isolationist pioneer Thomas Köner goes all the way in for his spiritual home of Mille Plateaux with a masterful new album of dynamic, grippingly minimalist sound designs "Motus is more (to me) than just music made with analogue synthesizers, it is about attitude, a way of relating to sound and the (e)motion it affects. A lifestyle, where movement, being moved and moving become one. My practice is vibrational, about the skin, touch and surfaces and the gaseous medium in bet…
Tacet #04: The Sounds of Utopia
**2020 stock. 560 pages!** The sound arts and experimental music annual review's 4th issue, on the theme of utopias. Utopia belongs to those concepts that haunt both the history of ideas and the history of artistic practice. In this fourth issue,Tacetsets off to listen to the sounds of utopia emerging from sound art and experimental music, but also from sound design and our everyday use of sound technology. Mixing science-fiction short stories, theoretical analysis and artists' writings, this i…
Ultrablack of Music
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 wa…