SZEPANSKI, Achim
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 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 operationality 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. [publisher's note]

Published by Milles Plateaux, 2020
Music & Sound