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Witness the return of Plastikman!
Seventeen years on from defining techno as we know it, Richie Hawtin has resurrected his most famous alter ego!
The music is techno. The festival is called Movement. And this year it’s beating fiercer than ever, thanks to the triumphant return of one of techno's most iconic live acts and the city’s best-loved sons. Richie Hawtin's Plastikman show has transformed Central Detroit - one weekend at least - from cemetery to playground.
Movement or DEMF as it’s known by the locals, has been held at Detroit's Hart Plaza over the Memorial Day bank holiday weekend at the end of May since the year 2000.
11 pm. The stage goes black and a curtain reveals a wide semi-circular cage clad in LEDs like a giant curved video wall. A single glowing red line slices across it accompanied by a humming synth. As the first beat drops and the line splits in two and begins pulsing, a loud cheer goes up from crowd clinging to every available surface in the concrete auditorium. Moments later the LED wall explodes into colour, then suddenly turns translucent revealing the silhouette of Richie Hawtin, flanked on either side by racks of drum machines, touch pads and a mixing desk, like a sonic alchemist at the controls of some infernal machine. Over the next hour he rips through an updated live rendition of the Plastikman back catalogue accompanied by synced, swirling, kaleidoscopic visuals set in stark contrast to the dark outlines of the skyscrapers that surround the stage.
Sitting down with Hawtin the following day it’s clear he's pleased and relieved by the reception. "Coming back to Detroit is always a magical experience for me, but there's always so much pressure to deliver," he explains. Dressed in his trademark loose-fitting T-shirt, high-top boots and skinny jeans, his blonde slick quiff less extreme than in the past his youthful looks belie that fact that he's due to turn 40 in a few days - particularly when you consider his work hard, party harder lifestyle. This is the Richie Hawtin that most of today's clubbers will be familiar with: the Tom Ford-styled superstar DJ famous for championing minimal techno and bringing the art of digitally mixing records into the 21st century. But in effect, this is his second identity. Hawtin shelved his Plastikman alter-ego after 'Mutek' in 2004.
He's come along way from the geeky, shaven-headed and bespectacled son of a British robotics engineer who in his late teens used to sneak over the border from his home in Windsor, Ontario to go to the old Music Institute in Detroit to listen to nascent techno. "It was literally just a black box with a big system and a single strobe where people would just lose their shit and dance," he says. "You needed to be a member to get in and my brother and I would be two of about five white kids who used to go there - but back then colour wasn't ever an issue, it was all about the music. I think it's a hat store now."
Inspired by these experiences and by watching Derrick May at the Bankle Building, which is still an arts and music venue to this day, Hawtin started to DJ, initially under the name Richie Rich. "My first DJ gig was me throwing a party at a club so that I could DJ. If I wanted to do something I'd generally try to do it myself," he recalls. “The most exciting period in Detroit for me, that inspired me to create the whole Plastikman phenomenon, was around ninety-two, ninety-three when the whole Paxahau gang were coming together and I started writing 'Sheet One', and then Spastik blew up." All this happened within a year, "It was an explosion," he remembers. "Creating Plastikman was really a reflection of me and my friends playing music and hanging out at weird Detroit after-hours clubs and dark warehouses doing loads of acid." At the time he didn't want to put his real name to a project that he felt was very much 'of an era', and he also didn't realise that this name would come to define an era and shape his entire career. "Over time I've grown to become Richie Hawtin the DJ, but really the true me is really still the introverted kid who is most at home in a small dark studio making music, which is exactly where Plastikman came from." When asked if it was a decision to resurrect an alias that made him famous in his early 20s a few months before he turns 40, Hawtin laughs. "Actually that’s merely coincidence; my main reason was that I went to see Etienne De Crecy’s live show [Cube] and it got me thinking."
The new Plastikman Live experience is way more than just Hawtin twiddling some knobs on a drum machine - in fact he's supported by a team of eleven. There's Franzie his tour manager, and Nima his trusted sound guy (who when he's not plugging in Traktor and Ableton for Hawtin at gigs is spotted raving at every single party Mixmag goes to over the course of the weekend). There's a sound engineer, a stage manager, a cameraman, a lighting guy, a network manager and right at the centre of the creative hub is Hawtin's long-standing visual visionary Ali Demirel. Ali, a nuclear scientist-turned-architect-turned-VJ, has been central to the recent performance identity of Hawtin and the Minus crew, and it would be safe to say there wouldn't be Plastikman Live without him. He creates the liquid, morphing LED trip that is the main USP of the live show, forming the visual yin to Hawtin's sonic yang. "It’s almost like Ali can read my mind”, explains Hawtin. "He manages to create visuals that mirror exactly what I'm aiming to do with sound. It’s a totally symbiotic relationship."
The Plastikman show is really a 'hello” to everyone who was there in the mid-90s, plus a reintroductlon for who weren't there so they can understand what they missed. “This is really just a new beginning”, explains Hawtin. "We've set the stage and now ready to take the next step." The King is back.
Plastikman plays Creamfields on August 28
