Mille Plateaux, ISBN-13: 978-3000648168, English, 268 pages, 2020, Germany

Achim Szepanski is the mostly known as the founder of two historical music labels, Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, but he is a quite distinctive figure in the electronic music scene. His original musicological positions blending Deleuze, Marxism and radical politics are unique and always intriguing through the lines of argument. He edits this book with an attentive international selection of artists, theorists and musicians researching both political and technical aspects of electronic music composition and economy. Among the essays we find the cosmological and ecological aspects of spectral music introduced by Frédéric Neyrat, an extensive explanation of the title’s militant and structural meaning by Szepanski himself, Holger Schulze defining the current capitalist use of sound as Panacoustic Society with its Sensology (sensorial ideology), and Shintaro Miyazaki describing his definition of ‘Counter-Raving’, a poetic collective attempt to reclaim a different timing to enable liberating practices. It’s a theoretically challenging text, where sound and music are nodal elements of a political scrutiny, supported by good doses of theory (McKenzie Wark is one of the most cited authors). Indeed, this surprising book includes also a code to download for a whole compilation of tracks, intended to be its aural consistent extension.