Canadian techno pioneer Richie Hawtin knows what it is like to be living on the periphery, a virtual outsider. When he was 10 his family departed their small English village for Windsor, Canada, just near the US border. Hawtin’s father accepted a job at General Motors in nearby Detroit as a robotic technician. The culture shock left Hawtin introverted, shy and detached. He desperately wanted to lose his English accent and fit in at school. And so perhaps it was this mindset that ultimately led him to explore underground electronic music – the traditional domain of loners. By his late teens Hawtin, raised on his father’s collection of Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk records, had taken up DJing in Windsor. He’d been exposed to the 80s’ industrial pop and the new techno music from Detroit and was inspired. Eventually Hawtin landed gigs in the Motor City. Here he would join a movement that has not only changed international club culture, but also determined his career path.

Hawtin DJed at Two Tribes in Melbourne a few months ago on the back of his killer mix-CD, Decks, EFX & 909, and he returned for an encore at Welcome 2001 on New Year’s Eve. “I definitely had a good time,” he says of Two Tribes. “I’ve been lucky, I’ve had really good experiences Down Under, so I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

In the late 80s Hawtin took up a residency at a Detroit club known as The Shelter – a venue with a racially mixed, suburban crowd that became the main alternative to the legendary Music Institute, the premiere techno music hall. Hawtin started to make forays into production after hooking up with Kenny Larkin and fellow Canadian DJ John Acquaviva. Hawtin and Acquaviva set up a label, Plus 8, and put out records by their own project States Of Mind (‘Elements Of Tone’) and Larkin (‘We Shall Overcome’). However, the Canadians inadvertently alienated their peers in Detroit with their third release, Cybersonick’s ‘Technarchy’, when they printed the words ‘The Future Sound Of Detroit’ on it. This text only served to further arouse the suspicions of techno’s African-American innovators towards the new (white) kids on the block. As a result, Plus 8 sagaciously changed tack, focussing more on its international identity – something that served it well after it signed up talents like Speedy J and Ken Ishii. Nevertheless, it was years before Hawtin could prove to Detroit’s Black electronic music community that he was a worthy ally.

And so it’s no wonder, then, that one of Hawtin’s career highlights should have come when he DJed at the inaugural Detroit Electronic Music Festival last May alongside Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Eddie “Flashin’” Fowlkes. The free fest, which attracted a reported 1.5 million over three days, unified the Motor City’s extended techno family. Indeed, the DEMF was a landmark because it drew unprecedented attention to the oft-neglected techno trailblazers in their home country. What’s more, the DEMF reclaimed techno music as a cultural force, as opposed to a manifestation of rave culture.

For Richie, who has for a decade thrown underground parties in Windsor and Detroit, it was above all an emotional experience. “You can’t explain it. I don’t think we ever in our wildest imaginations thought that what we were involved in that night was going to be possible. We never felt that we’d be in downtown Detroit right in Hart Plaza, right within the city, being welcomed by the city and by the people. People sometimes talk about highlights of their lives and it gets to one point and that will always be the highlight and there’s nothing else better. I can see a lot of other highlights coming, but in a lot of ways nothing will ever touch that because it was so unexpected.”

In 2000 Hawtin and Acquaviva relaunched Plus 8, assembling a compilation, 1990 – 1997 Plus 8 Classics, to mark its tenth anniversary. Hawtin considers it to be a gift to those who grew up with the label, as well as a “history lesson” for “the generation who is just starting to grow up with electronic music now.”

Yet the two have “limited plans” only for further releases on Plus 8, since with their heavy schedules it would be logistically impossible to run a large concern and, as Hawtin acknowledges, times have changed and these days most techno artists have their own local labels. (For example, Hawtin has his M_nus imprint.)

Lately Hawtin has overseen a second compilation, Richie Hawtin Selections 1990 – 2000, for exclusive issue in Australasia through Hardware Records that gathers together his own recordings as Plastikman, FUSE and Circuit Breaker. “It gives a diverse overview of what I’ve been doing. I haven’t only been doing harder tracks – some of them on there are more mellow or more introspective cuts, like FUSE Vs LFO, ‘Loop’. I think you can really hear after listening to all the tracks this progression that I’ve been going through for the last 10 years. There’s definitely a Richie Hawtin stamp on there, but they don’t all sound the same and that’s something, I guess, that’s special about them.”

From the outset Hawtin’s approach to techno has been defined by a certain cleverness, best exemplified by his work as the postmodern acid gremlin Plastikman, but in recent times he has conspicuously aligned himself with the abstract intellectualism represented by Detroit’s Jeff Mills and Robert Hood – the original masters of techno minimalism. Hawtin is aware of this shift in focus and attributes it to his evolution as an artist.

“I think some people get to a certain age and they just seem to stop developing, but to the other half life is about development, life is about growing, and one of the reasons I got involved in electronic music and techno was that growth potential. It was something that was always ever-changing; whatever was answering a certain question, a certain answer, it was also posing two or three new questions – and that’s what has pushed me along for the last 10 or 11 years and, because of that, because of that push, because of that change, my outlook has changed and I’ve grown as a person. So, yeah, the partying and making dance tracks was great in the beginning, and I still like to do that, but I’ve always been on a search for something else, and so it takes you down these different pathways. I think now I understand, or appreciate, both things. I think there is room for a music, techno music, to still make people move on the dancefloor, and do nothing but that – that’s an amazing power in itself – but there’s always ways to use techno to explore further concepts or ideas, which maybe wasn’t being done 10 years ago or maybe isn’t done so regularly with other music.”

The irony is that some of Hawtin’s Second Wave contemporaries from Detroit – Carl Craig, Kenny Larkin and Stacey Pullen – have since dissociated themselves from the term ‘techno’, for artistic, socio-cultural and ideological reasons. “I think some of us who started with the word ‘techno’ have grown into different areas. Someone like Carl has grown into fusing jazz and that kind of sound with his stuff, so he’s more about that fusion, whereas some of us – like, say, myself, Jeff [Mills] and some other people – are still trying to be involved in the techno side of things, which is more about fusing it with, not so much older sounds or older rhythms or contemporary things, but something unknown. So it’s a hard line, because I love Carl’s work and, to me, it’s still very techno. I think being from Detroit and being from around the area, there’s been so many weird connotations with that term that some people just find it easier to relinquish it, but I hold strong to the belief of what techno meant to me in the beginning – that it is something progressive, something futuristic and something kinda unknown. That’s what I try to put into everything I do – whether it’s a dance track or whether it’s a listening track or whether it’s something a little bit more conceptual or experimental. There’s always a sense of the unknown and a sense of maybe at least a possible future.”

So while today even Derrick May regards the evolution of techno with ambivalence, primarily because of the music’s association with the hedonism of European rave, Hawtin and Mills view it as a means of conceiving The Future, a utopia where race, gender and national differences are rendered obsolete. “I think ‘techno’ is sometimes just another word for ‘progressive’ – ‘progressiveness’,” Hawtin offers.

This year Hawtin intends to deliver another album project on NovaMute, but at this stage he has no idea under what guise it will take. And the Canadian is unsure whether he will resurrect either his Plastikman or FUSE monickers or conceive a new one altogether. “I have no idea what it’s gonna be yet,” he muses. “We’ll see where the sound takes me.”

Richie Hawtin Artifakts:

When Hawtin and John Acquaviva started collaborating at the end of the 80s they intended to cut a Derrick May radio megamix; they were distracted and recorded some original material instead.

Simon Reynolds’ book on rave culture, Generation Ecstasy, argues that Hawtin’s early work was a catalyst for Dutch gabba music and German trance – two things he has since strived to distance himself from.

Hawtin was barred from entering the US – and thus visiting his beloved Detroit – in the mid-90s for a year after a problem at the border.

Hawtin has produced ambient techno as FUSE. He put out the FUSE album Dimension Intrusion on Warp Records in 1993.

Hawtin has released a trilogy of Plastikman albums – Sheet One (1993), Musik (1994) and Consumed (1998). There was also a fourth album, Artifakts [bc], in 1998 – comprising recordings completed between Musik and Consumed for the Klinik LP, a project Hawtin abandoned when he was exiled from the US.

Richie Hawtin collaborated with Carl Craig on the Innerzone Orchestra album, Programmed. Their track, ‘Architecture’, was inspired by Bladerunner.

Hawtin was among the select invite-only guests at 2000’s first-ever Musik Und Maschine (M +M) techno congress in Berlin. The congress was initiated by Jeff Mills and Tresor Records director Dimitri Hegemann. It has its own ‘techno’ awards, voted by participants. Others in attendance included John Acquaviva, Alan Oldham, James Pennington, Claude Young, Cristian Vogel, James Ruskin, Adam Beyer, Oliver Ho and Kodjo Eschun.

This year Hawtin is to commence a residency at Sven Vath’s new Cocoon club night in Ibiza.


Richie Hawtin Selections 1990 – 2000 is out through Hardware/Shock

Read the review of Richie’s performance at Welcome 2001 in Melbourne