Immovable object, unstoppable force

>> The impact of abstrac-tronica label Force Inc., home of Montreal's Jetone, is more than just theoretical

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There are any number of reasons that Montreal is developing a rep as a world centre for abstract and intellectualized electronic culture, particularly in the realm of music and its bleed-through to other disciplines. There are the festivals, obviously, like Mutek and the New Cinema and Media fest. There are spaces like SAT and Ex-Centris, for which the propagation of digital postmodernism is pretty much a raison d'être. And there are the musicians and labels themselves, like Alien8 and its technoid offshoot Substractif, home to the likes of Thomas Jirku and David Kristian.

That reputation can only be further buttressed by the fact that the German-based Force Inc. label group, following the lead of Ninja Tune, have established their North American home here as well. Encompassing no less than five separate labels, Force Inc. and its own offshoots are home to many of the most prominent names in the genre. A genre that goes by many names--clicks 'n' cuts, minimal techno, microbeats, whatever--but is both increasingly impacting more mainstream electronica (refer to the Björk review elsewhere in this issue) and dissolving the ivory-tower elitism from which it, and frankly most any academically informed art, suffers.

History explained

Perhaps a little history lesson is in order here. Jon Berry, the guy in charge of Force Inc.'s operations on this side of the pond, is ready to oblige. "Force Inc. was established in Frankfurt, Germany in 1991 by a guy named Achim Szepanski, primarily as a house label. Out of that, it gave rise to artists such as Ian Pooley, DJ Tonka and Alec Empire. He was one of the first Force Inc. artists, doing acid techno and house music. You'd be amazed what he's worked on--prior to his Digital Hardcore days, he released some of the most outstanding techno. Mike Ink's another major artist who's come out of the whole thing. He went on to start the Kompakt label of his own, and the whole distribution collective that's come out of that. That's been very successful, and he's also one of our Mille Plateaux artists, under the name Gas, which is very popular."

Mille Plateaux is another of the five labels, and the one that in its very name houses the very spirit of Force Inc.--but we'll get to that. There's also Ritornell, Force Tracks and, for the junglists out there, Position Chrome. "That's recognized as Panacea's label--he's a well-known drum & bass DJ and producer, known for making brutally hard, extreme drum & bass, which is pretty much what that label stands for. That label also gave way to artist like Techno Animal, who released their first recordings on the label.

"We've been outsiders with Position Chrome because of the fact that we never became part of the U.K. scene. We were never accepted by them, because they're very cliquish and nationalistic. Germany actually has a very strong drum & bass scene as well. It's remarkable what's come out of the Position Chrome label, brutally hard but at the same time melodic. And influential--Panacea was such an influence on the whole tech-step thing."

Clicking on, cutting out

But jockeying around the hierarchy of the often arrogant and self-absorbed DJ/electronica scene is hardly what Szepanski was thinking about when he formulated Force Inc. No, there were far loftier issues to address. A respected critical thinker in Germany, Szepanski was always one to put his money where his mouth is.

"Back in the early '90s, it stood very much against racism and fascism," explains Montrealer Tim Hecker, who launches his new Force Inc. album Ultramarin, under the Jetone moniker, this weekend. "You'd go into the office and there'd be this big Che Guevara flag on the wall. You could talk to Achim about Marxism, he's read Das Kapital eight times. It was very controversial at the time, they were getting death threats at the office and things like that. Politics played a big part, but these days he's realizing that it's more about state of mind. He's very much into new media theory and following through on that.

"The Mille Plateaux label's origins, as I understand, were inspired by The Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze, a quintessential work of French contemporary philosophy from the late '70s. Really radical shit--to this day it's heralded as a key text of the last few years, completely revolutionary. It's often taken as a bible by artists. It's really romantic, out-there and mystical."

"Critical theory has always been a part of that label," says Berry. "All throughout there's been a sort of thought process behind it, and with the digital blow-up that came around over the last three or four years, they've really taken it by the horns. They've made a whole aesthetic theory around it, with the idea of the clicks and cuts, where the unessential sounds become a source of music.

"Szepanski wrote a great thesis that goes into detail about where he's coming from, for the first of Mille Plateaux's Clicks & Cuts compilations. Using reference tones, picking what's been labelled as unessential sounds, whether it's the wind blowing, CDs skipping or me tapping on a glass, and utilizing them, putting them into a new form that's cohesive and comes out as melody or music. I think the first Clicks & Cuts compilation was very experimental, introducing this new movement. It had been happening the year before with artists like Frank Brettschneider, Karsten Nikolai, even Pan Sonic.

"What's happening now with the movement is that it's infecting other genres. With the second compilation, we invited artists like Two Lone Swordsmen, who are known for doing classic electro tracks, or Swayzak, artists who might not necessarily have been experimental but have a true interest in experimental music and where it's heading. Each, in their own area, are trying to create a new form of electronic musicianship and composing."

Another kind of techno

To even attempt to convey the complex theories behind Force Inc. on this single page would be a frustrating and disappointing endeavour. Pointless, too, considering that the Web site, force-inc.com, has a vast archive of theoretical texts hidden behind one tiny little square with a T in it. There, Szepanski and colleagues hold forth at length on the ideas that inspire them. Big thoughts to digest, but, in the tradition of sampling, one can pull out lone sentences to mull over. Statements like, "Music does not function as a carrier of messages but offers nothing but empty signification and resists any attempt at decoding, so it allows more or less allows any for of reinterpretation," from Szepanski's "Digital Music & Mediatheory." That sounds an awful lot like Schoenberg's ol' wisecrack about music, ultimately, being about nothing but itself, doesn't it?

This idea certainly applies to Jetone's Ultramarin, his second album and first with Force Inc. This is not music that can be explained in any direct, concrete manner. It can be described, however, as beautiful, engaging, dignified and rich, with myriad tones and textures lurking behind already subdued beats and basslines. Of course it's techno at its root, but then techno is somewhat visceral and abstracted to begin with.

"It is techno, ultimately," says Hecker of his work, "but it's like engaging in an aesthetic practice like sculpture. You enter the discipline and think about how you can do it differently, you may even do some radical, fucked-up shit, but it's still sculpture. At the same time, it's not Ikea music. There are a couple tracks on the album that could be played in a club, with the 130 bpm."

A clue lies in Hecker's own roundabout admission to the techno world. "It's kind of a fluke, I guess. I came into through the back door. I grew up raving a little bit, but I wasn't a techno freak all my life. I came into it through people like Mike Ink and Alec Empire. It wasn't punk, but it wasn't your average electronic music. I didn't grow up in Germany or the U.K., and the rave scene and electronic music in Canada was way backward, so I just listened to other shit. I was doing rock shit, which sucked. The guitarist or the drummer sucked, so I bought a sampler and sampled the drums. Before you know it, I'm sequencing the drums, throwing away the guitar, working on the sampler and doing more fucked-up, inorganic-sounding beats. It's just a trajectory that's led somewhere."

The sound of blue

Where it has led is somewhere devoid of both the crassness of commercial dance traxx and the icy pretension of the overly academic. "I come from a very melodic background. I tend not be interested in minimalist-type things, even artists on the same label. A lot of German minimalism I'm not really into for the reason that it's so fucking cold and inhuman. I see no time to listen to it. I'm totally obsessed with blue music, things that take you somewhere, transcendental stuff. It's classic aesthetics in terms of art, art as transcendence as opposed to some intellectual game--the same old obsession with beauty that people have been trying to achieve for years, but hasn't been in vogue, artistically, for the last 50 years. Transcendence is what I'm after, what I'll try on my next project, what I'll be after until I die. That aesthetic purity--I can't see myself going more into the cold, intellectual exploration of machine structure, bullshit like that.

"I think of it as using advanced technology to make advanced organic music, in some way. To reorganicize it, not through sampling guitar, sax and jazz drums--that's technological, but it's safe in that it's jazzy in its reference to other things, so it hinges on this idea of nostalgia. You can take things and punish them, use processes that are so radical that it becomes something all on its own, free-floating organic music."

"That's overall what Force Inc. tries to do with our records," interjects Berry. "Give something that won't be turning your living room into this strobe-filled fantasyland. Tim's work, for me, is very self-reflective, deeply personal music with an organic quality. It's very individual how people are taking this album. Normally, you get an album where, across the board, everyone says it's got these qualities, it works in this way. Everyone's taking this one very personally, because Ultramarin's got so many different layers."

CD launch with Jetone, Manitoba and Thomas Jirku at Centro Social Español on Friday, Aug. 31, 9pm, $10