The Robert: The Rhizome within Microhouse and Dub-Techno

During my time in Seoul, when I told people I met at clubs or music-stores that I was from Germany, I'd often be asked the same question: "Are you into techno?" This didn't surprise me; German youth and techno a stereotype generally made abroad. Then, though, if I told them I was from Frankfurt, sometimes I'd be asked, "Have you been to Robert Johnson?"
No, I had not. How did people across the other side of the world know of a club an hour away from my house when I had never heard of it in 18 years of living nearby? How is it that I became interested in its web of music, all closely associated to Germany, even to Frankfurt and Darmstadt, when I was across the other side of the world myself?
The following examples explore this strange realization, discussing the output of the record-label Mille Plateaux, and that of the artists Jan Jelinek and Monolake, in order to explore the rhizomatic possibilities in microhouse and dub-techno.

–

In April 1996, Simon Reynolds interviewed Achim Szepanski about his Frankfurt-based label for The Wire. Having named the label after Deleuze and Guattari's work A Thousand Plateaus, Szepanski's approach to music is clearly informed by philosophy. In the interview, he expresses that he sees his label as "the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory", in which he hopes to platform artists that give form to concepts such as the rhizome. He explains that, in music, the rhizomatic connotes to the "Eno/dub idea" of democratizing sound, in which artists strive to dismantle the "normal ranking of instruments" and in its place, create more interesting and more honest art. Szepanski traces this approach to music from the "fractal funk and chaos-theorems of CAN and early Miles Davis" to the deconstruction of electronica he has witnessed in his millieu and the micro-house (or, honestly, genre-less music) of his label.

Jan Jelinek was born in Darmstadt. He is most famous for his album ‘Loop Finding Jazz Records’ (2001), although he has also released a steady stream of beautiful noise under the monikers Farben and Gramm. His approach to producing music comes from the reconfiguration of pre-recorded sounds – taking tiny, second-long samples from existent songs (in the case of his 2001 album; Jazz from the 1960s and 70s). This approach to sampling creates sound that is somewhere on the edge of the liminal space between memory and unique creation – this tension creating a game of cat-and-mouse for many listeners. Critics have spent years arguing that they recognize a tiny sample within his music, but they can never be sure – the sound somewhere too deep within its new form to really float to the surface of the listener's mind. Using microsamples and clicks & cuts, Jelinek has created a maze of barely-distinguishable references one can easily lose oneself in – a rhizome of its own; expanding past the boundaries of time, and past the formal conceptions of genre – deterritorializing into unknown fields.

Robert Henke is co-founder of both the musical project Monolake and the software program Ableton. He began his musical career at Chain Reaction, the sister label of Moritz van Oswald & Mark Ernestus’ label Basic Channel – both cultural giants of the late 90’s Berlin experimental dub-techno scene. Henke’s early output with Chain Reaction heavily focused on re-contextualizing found sound – field recordings from a trip to Hong Kong and Mainland China emerge re-worked in ‘Cyan’ and ‘Gobi’. These sounds give surprising texture to the music – are either twisted into new and unrecognizable sounds like in Jelinek’s music (e.g. the sound of mosquito pitched down and sped up to become a steady bass-line in ‘Cyan’), or remain intact and clearly identifiable, adding visual references – especially to one’s own memories – to the music (as in the sound of a distant subway announcement, the wind rushing past as a train approaches in ‘Mass Transit Railway’, stretching familiar sounds into reflective melancholy.) The experience of listening to this, being reminded of one’s own long commutes in distant cities, and the consequent delinearization of time that occurs when one 'time-travels' in this manner, is reminiscent of Deleuze’s suggestion that music makes the force of time audible.

Henke’s prominent use of field-recordings is similar to the practice developed by artists associated with Musique Concrète. These artists used found sound (e.g., the sound of water dropping; the sound of stones) as instruments: the raw material of their music, stretching the limits of what music had theretofore been conceived as. Moreover, Henke’s role in developing a software that remains integral to the cabinet of tools available to both modern composer and DJ, and especially his personalization of his MIDI controller (the ‘Monodeck’), realizes the Musique Concrète practice of creating your own instrument – to the point of a technological ‘sebstanfassung’ of the very same instrument – the computer hearing itself and turning itself into sound. In this model, the sound rhizomatically stretches away from, and then back onto, itself – far away from the hierarchy of sounds and strict categorization of instruments abundant in other music.