Future Music Festival: The Likes Of You live preview

Billed as a “mini techno festival within a festival”, The Likes Of You tent will be something to behold at Future Music Festival 2011. Here you’ll find four of the line-up’s headiest acts: Cocoon’s ringleader Sven Vath, his protégé and Ibiza offsider Loco Dice, techno innovator Richie Hawtin in his Plastikman guise and last but not least, Leftfield live. That’s going to be an intense seven-or-so hours. To help get you in the head-space, inthemix has put together this Likes Of You live preview.

RIchie Hawtin presents Plastikman

Richie Hawtin doesn’t do things by halves. Nowhere is his meticulous work ethic more in evidence than the Plastikman live show. In recent years, Hawtin the DJ has taken over from his seminal ‘90s guise, but in 2010 he rebooted ‘Plastikman LIVE’ on an ambitious scale.

Working alongside visual architects Derivative, the vision was to create a “highly concentrated one-hour experience” with Hawtin at its centre, controlling everything on-the-fly. He commands his bank of machines behind a curved LED screen that pulses and shifts in time with the music. The first run of the new set-up happened in March at Germany’s Time Warp, with further stops at Coachella, Detroit Electronic Music Festival, Bestival and Creamfields.

The key message of ‘PLASTIKMAN LIVE’ is ‘live’. “Everything in the live set is recreated,” Hawtin told Germany’s Groove magazine, republished in English here. “It doesn’t sample any of the old songs. It’s not a recording of the old songs. The 303 lines have been reprogrammed.”

“I don’t have the hands-in-the-air the entire show,” he continued. “I can do that as a DJ, but Plastikman isn’t that. That’s the challenge: To make a show that’s engaging, where people are blown away, but where they haven’t necessarily been dancing full-on for the hour.”

Leftfield

Leftfield needed just two albums to cement itself as one of dance music’s greats. Those albums were of course Leftism and Rhythm And Stealth, effortlessly traversing dub, techno, reggae and unadulterated ‘90s rave. In 2002, Neil Barnes and Paul Daley decided to quit while they were ahead. Now, eight years on, Leftfield is back on the road with a live show that’s sure to rearrange some minds at Future Music Festival.

Barnes has gone it alone with this incarnation of Leftfield, but he’s joined by a sprawling band that includes original vocalists Djum Djum, Earl 16 and Cheshire Cat.

“We do about nine tracks and they’re quite long, Leftfield tracks,” Barnes told us down the line from his London studio. “It’s a very intricate and complicated thing to perform. Because we don’t work on the same BPM all the way, there’s a strict order to it: a beginning, middle and end. Just like Leftfield albums, it’s a real journey. We’ve got live drums, lots of keyboards, effects, vocals, percussion; it’s not just with a computer.”

Essential to that journey is volume. As the legendary story goes, the duo made plaster fall from the roof at the Brixton Academy in the ‘90s due to the dangerous levels of bass. As Barnes was quick to inform inthemix, going loud is still his main aim. Find a spot near the speaker stack, if you dare.

Sven Vath

You certainly get your money’s worth out of Sven Väth. 2011 will be the techno don’s third run at Future Music Festival, and the precedent has been set for some wholesale madness. After all, this is the man whose idea of a sideshow is a six-and-a-half hour set in someone’s backyard.

Unstoppable force that he is, Väth has not taken pause since leaving here in March. Between his state-of-the-art Cocoon club and restaurant in Frankfurt, his Party Animals season at Amnesia in Ibiza and all the bookings in between, business is booming.

As he proved under The Likes Of You tent this year, Väth is in his element playing techno for big rooms. However, the tracklist for his new The Sound of the Eleventh Season compilation shows he’s also not afraid to take it slower and deeper with the likes of Solomun, DJ Koze and Chateau Flight. He also remains a vinyl purist and – in case you hadn’t noticed – an unashamed showman.

Loco Dice

As he proved on his Ten Years Cocoon Ibiza disc from last year, Loco Dice is in his element as a DJ. Rhythmic, groove-led and mixed with finesse, his sets are always moving. It’s likely he’ll be the one to start ramping things up in the Likes Of You Tent (think Dubfire’s 2010 slot), a role he’s filled with ease over countless hazy nights in Ibiza.

Last year saw Loco Dice make the opposite move from most DJs on the rise, announcing a run of 14 shows at venues with a capacity of 300 or less. The tour proved a storming success; all sweat-on-the-walls and bumping house. Put him alongside Sven Vath – who he considers ‘The Greatest DJ Of All Time’ – and you’ve got a party.