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Roll Call: Richie Hawtin @ Footwork (pg. 5)
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| jon jon |
http://www.thestar.com/entertainmen...fantastik-again
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Plastik Fantastik Again
By Ben Rayner Pop Music Critic
What's the next best thing to a new Plastikman album? Everything Plastikman has ever recorded in one giant box, that's what.
Windsor-bred techno luminary Richie Hawtin has been especially generous in bringing his most infamous — and awesome — alter ego back to life this year, the highlight of which has undoubtedly been the revival of Plastikman as a live entity after seven years in limbo.
Those stunning shows, thus far limited to a mere handful of dates that included Detroit's Movement festival in late May but still nothing in Canada, witnessed Hawtin setting an entirely new standard for himself as an artist and a performer with a self-contained multimedia production unprecedented in electronic-music circles in terms of its ambition and technological accomplishment.
It's hard to imagine him topping it, in fact, until he gets tired of these new toys and builds himself another high-tech setup. This one essentially hallucinates to Plastikman for you, through computer animation generated on the fly by the music Hawtin plays live; one quakes in terror at the thought of what the next one will do.
While we wait for that to materialize, though, we can kill a hell of a lot of time with the forthcoming Plastikman box set, Arkives. It's literally everything Hawtin has ever released under the Plastikman moniker, gathered together with loads of extra tracks on 11 CDs or LPs or one massive download (or all three, if you've got deep pockets) with a DVD and a book and packaged in a snazzy case embossed with your very own name. They'll be manufactured and shipped in the exact number of orders received through his label's website, www.M-nus.com, by Dec. 31, then that's it.
“My plan is, once this comes out, next year we all begin 2011 on the same page. Then it's back to ‘fast forward to the future' normal,” says Hawtin — who'll be DJ-ing at Footwork this Thursday night — during a recent visit to Toronto. “I want to continue moving forward, I want to take Plastikman to its next logical or illogical step. But I believe that for me to have the freedom to go wherever I want, everybody needs to know where it came from.
“Once I started going back into the archives for the live show and realizing that I wanted to resurrect this project, I started to come to the conclusion that I needed to — I don't know — explain everything that's happened. Some people who've been there from the beginning have grown up, got their jobs or kids and maybe lost touch. You've got another group of people who've stayed for the whole thing.
“And then, in the last 10 years, you've got this surge of interest in ‘Richie Hawtin,' Minus (records), and this whole new breed of things. It was the thing that we needed to bring focus back.”
Plastikman's music has never gone away as the creepy, acid-shocked minimalism Hawtin cooked up on early albums — Sheet One and Muzik — is already in the history books as one of the linchpins of Detroit techno's second wave. New Plastikman tunes have, however, largely taken a back seat to Hawtin's pursuits as a globetrotting rock-star DJ, label entrepreneur and technology enthusiast — he owns part of the digital music-delivery service Beatport, helped develop the vinyl-free DJ tool Final Scratch and has built impossibly complex custom mixers with his robotics-engineer father — since he relocated from Windsor to Berlin nearly seven years ago.
The move to such a techno-friendly locale has enabled Minus to grow beyond Hawtin's wildest dreams.
It has turned the label into a respected and well-known nexus for the talents of such fellow minimalists as Magda, Troy Pierce, Marc Houle and Gaiser. Life is generally easier for an electronic musician in Germany, too, he says.
“People live electronic music over there,” says Hawtin. “Finding lighting guys and sound guys and touring guys and logistics and designing people for electronic musicians — with no guitars involved — all of that stuff just happens there. There's an infrastructure and an understanding on a very basic level of electronic music and electronic-music culture. And that has allowed everything to explode for the projects that I'm involved in.
“I knew it was going to be good for me and good for the label, but honestly, 10 years ago John (Acquaviva) and I closed Plus 8 because it was just too much work and the pressure of everything was ridiculous. And now this operation is double the size of what Plus 8 was in its heyday.”
The itch to cloister himself in the studio and get his Plastikman back on has struck again, though, and the plan is to return to Windsor once the snow flies — Hawtin misses Canadian winters — and get deep and dark again for the first time since 2003's Closer.
A large part of Hawtin's renewed inspiration is the Plastikman touring rig, an in-the-round rig ringed with three-dimensional LED screens that literally lets you see the music he's playing. He's been trying to get this thing off the ground since debuting a noticeably incomplete version of the system to savage reviews at the 2003 Mutek festival in Montreal, an experience that left him “crushed” but nevertheless gave him the determination to bring the technology up to speed with his imagination and do it right this time.
It is, as Hawtin puts it, “f---ing complicated,” requiring him to control 32 channels of audio alone before the rest of the gadgets are even brought into the picture. When the last of the Plastikman live dates of 2010 wraps up in Tokyo next month, though, the whole thing will be sufficiently road-tested that he'll be ready to start exploring the stage show's true potential with new material written expressly with it in mind.
“Now that we have the system, now that we can open it up and we know that it works, now it's about fleshing it out,” he says. “It's about writing new programs and content on top of that.
“The live show will now become the test bed for new material, but before I can go into the new material I needed one to reintroduce the new and old kids to Plastikman live and also give them that back story. Arkives is that back story. Arkives is to get everybody prepared for where I want to take Plastikman live.”
Hawtin is in a rare position to be doing events on such a grand scale considering the experimental bent of much of his work. “I have more popularity than I should for the music and the stuff that I'm into. That's what I think, anyway,” he says, and he's probably right. Many of us are still scratching our heads at how snippets of his old F.U.S.E. track “Substance Abuse” made it into the opening ceremonies of the Torino Winter Olympics when he was asked to score part of the affair in 2006, for instance, although we're very grateful they got there.
In any case, with electronic-music audiences picking up, old-school rave nostalgia in full swing and opportunities to play more big events, Hawtin is determined to use that position wisely.
“People say it's growing again and if I have anything to do with it as it grows with Deadmau$ and Boyz Noize and all these other guys, there's going to be an undercurrent under there for the really weird kids ,” he says. “In a way, our scene is bigger than ever, but it's poppier than ever, too. When it gets so big and you bring pop into it, you lose some of the integrity.
“What I do with Plastikman is unique. I feel that there's a void in music and performance right now and Plastikman can fit that. So I feel it's my responsibility.”
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| kotsy |
got my ticket!
sasha - you suck at roll calls! :p |
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| r5a |
me and rT19 are going.
btg you should come too meng |
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| Elendil |
| Me + my soon to be lost sanity. |
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| MikeyN |
| quote: | Originally posted by xJillx
uploading it now :D.... the opening of this set is 100% the most epic amazing opening to a set EVER lol and then the bass kicks in... |
Holy dude!!! That intro sounds like it's the opening sequence for Richie Hawtin in IMAX 3D... So many layers working together to achieve this awesome balance and harmony and then just falling apart into complete mayhem assembly line techno.
Right on!! I can see why you and Ry dig this set so much. It's mad!!! |
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| jad |
Great set. Thanks for uploading. |
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| LightsOut |
| quote: | Originally posted by xJillx
its not from time warp it says Big Outside Festival 2009
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Which is from Medellín, Colombia - 12.09.2009, for everyone who's anal about keeping organized like me lol
:tongue2 :crazy: |
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| Knox |
| quote: | Originally posted by kaniz
Since there was such drama over posting dated Ricardo sets as hype material, how about a 2010 set from Hawtin from this past Halloween? Hard to get much more recent than this :P
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i really enjoyed this set... gave it a listen this morning... |
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| Endlesswave |
| Ok what are the odds of me getting in if I get there at 12:30 am? I work until 11pm. Ugh. |
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| Elendil |
| quote: | Originally posted by Endlesswave
Ok what are the odds of me getting in if I get there at 12:30 am? I work until 11pm. Ugh. |
Piss poor... so why not order tickets online? ;) |
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