techno · minimal-techno

Richie Hawtin

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The architect of minimal techno, Plastikman on record and a live rig that treats the mixer itself as the instrument.

Richie Hawtin was born in Banbury, England, in 1970 and moved at age nine to LaSalle, a suburb of Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit. His father, a robotics technician at General Motors, introduced him to Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. He began DJing at seventeen, mentored by Scott "Go-Go" Gordon at The Shelter in Detroit, and later dropped out of a film program at the University of Windsor.

In 1990 he co-founded the Plus 8 label with John Acquaviva, naming it after a turntable's pitch control, and released his own tracks under names including F.U.S.E. and Cybersonik while the label put out early records by Speedy J and Kenny Larkin.

The Plastikman alias arrived in 1993 with the single "Spastik" and the album Sheet One: acid lines wrung out of a Roland 303 over long, sparse arrangements, with Consumed later stripping things down almost to room tone. That same year he released F.U.S.E.'s debut album, Dimension Intrusion, as part of Warp's Artificial Intelligence series.

Hawtin was counted among the second wave of Detroit-linked producers pushing minimal techno, alongside Daniel Bell, Robert Hood, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig and Mike Banks. He founded Minus in 1998, and after time in New York moved his base to Berlin, where he developed artists such as Magda, Gaiser, Marc Houle, Hearttrob and Troy Pierce. His DE9 mixes, built from hundreds of small fragments rather than whole tracks, shaped his layered, effects-heavy approach to playing live.

In 2016 he launched the technology company PLAYdifferently and released the Model 1 mixer with Andy Rigby-Jones, and between 2012 and 2015 he held a weekly residency, ENTER., at Space in Ibiza.

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