Richie Hawtin (2014)

Torsten Schmidt

We do have a one Richie Hawtin sitting next to us and I’d like you all to welcome him.

Richie Hawtin

And we have my friend Itaru [Yasuda] sitting next to me who we’re going to introduce later, but he’s the visual side of my team. We’ll get there somewhere in the next hour.

Torsten Schmidt

How big is that team?

Richie Hawtin

I’m trying to keep my team to all be able to sit at the dinner table together, which I think–

Torsten Schmidt

If you’re Jesus that can be a pretty big table.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, but it gets over 10 or 12 people and you’re out with your friends having dinner or something and the conversations start to go in different places and it’s very easy for one side of the table to get alienated from the other side. So 12, 14 people is really pushing it. I think with full-time people and part-time and friends we’re around that right now. It takes quite a lot of dedicated people to bring the shows that we’re doing to fruition. A lot of development time in the beginning, a lot of time once they’re ready to go and a lot of time just taking it from one place to another because we do a lot of different type of shows. They all have their challenges and of course travelling the world isn’t easy. It’s not about just jumping on a plane when you’ve got equipment and team members coming from different places. Sometimes we have people going to one gig while we’re doing another gig, for pre-setup and checking everything. So it’s quite complicated. Luckily it seems very simple because we have a great team, but it takes a lot of logistics and management.

Torsten Schmidt

And all of that on the back of what started with two turntables and a mixer, right?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, exactly. I think we all start in simple situations. Is there an old, archaic black and white mixer on one of these TV screens?

Torsten Schmidt

Not yet, but…

Richie Hawtin

OK, yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

That’s a pretty heavyweight one, right?

Richie Hawtin

It’s definitely heavier than the mixers are now, but that’s kind of where I started in 1990-something. No, hold on, 1987, ‘88, around that time I started DJing in the basement of my mom and dad’s house in Windsor, Canada, which is right across the border from Detroit. Luckily just across the border from Detroit, because that’s where I spent a lot of time as a teenager, going to and eventually DJing and bumping into a lot of very important people in the electronic techno community. Around that time you had the beginnings of the careers of Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins and a whole gang of other techno supporters. As a kid I was just trying to follow what they were doing.

Torsten Schmidt

How did you learn about them?

Richie Hawtin

The techno community, or electronic music scene, is quite large now, but at that moment there was probably a couple hundred people into electronic music in Detroit. So if you went to any of the clubs you very quickly started seeing the same people on the dancefloor, in the DJ booth. How I play now, how I try to conduct my business, how I connect with people, all comes from those early days because it was such a small community and there was no types of hierarchy. It was a very level playing field.

A couple of years later when I was DJing in Detroit you’d have Kevin Saunderson or Derrick May come over and be like, “Here’s a white label.” Or even sometimes they had test reel-to-reels, or they had what was called a metal master at that time. It was kind of a pre-master copy. “Hey, see how this Inner City sounds, how the vocals sound.” And it was super cool, you know? I never really wanted to be a– well, maybe I wanted to be a musician or be on stage. I think every kid thinks, at one time, to do that, but I was pretty introverted. I didn’t think I was cut out for being an entertainer.

Torsten Schmidt

Especially since some of those guys are pretty outgoing.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, well, Derrick, Kev and all those guys, they were all football players and baseball players, kind of the jocks of the team. They were definitely more outgoing than I was. I was happy to meet these guys, who were so down to earth, but also happy to, later on, disappear into the DJ booth, which was in the corner of the club. Only the real music geeks were looking at that person, if they could find them. It was about a dancefloor experience. It was definitely way before the DJ as an entertainer or DJ as a star.

Back to this mixer, why I’m bringing it up, there’s been a lot of development of effects and [Ableton] Pushes and Maschines and people using equipment in the DJ booth, but for me, from the beginning, playing two records on top of each other wasn’t really enough. By watching, especially Derrick comes to mind, when Derrick May was playing in the late ‘80s, sometimes he would have a [Roland] 808 or 909 next to him, sometimes a cassette deck, many times a reel-to-reel. But whatever mixer he was using – and I think I probably bought this mixer because he had this mixer, I’m sure it was connected somehow – he was always working the EQ and highlighting just the mids or the low end of one record to another, and that philosophy, that style of DJing in Detroit at that moment, really was burned into my brain. Every step of the way in my career I’ve tried to find new ways of making records sound different or making me excited in how I play.

The first time I stepped behind the decks in a club, which was at The Shelter in Detroit, I had that mixer and I even had a little stomp box delay unit from my studio.

Torsten Schmidt

So you already had a studio?

Richie Hawtin

I already had a studio there. It was already, basically – I didn’t have the drum machine, my effects are now on the computer, but the idea was already there. What is commonplace now was even then, and I’m talking 1988, ‘89 – in Detroit at least because that was my only perspective at that moment – that was already commonplace there.

Torsten Schmidt

Was Windsor in the vicinity of the Detroit FM signals?

Richie Hawtin

That’s actually a very good point because before I started venturing out to Detroit to go nightclubbing, I think at that moment we had one radio station, maybe two and one TV station in Windsor that we could pick up that were actually Canadian. Everything else, the other eight or nine channels at that moment, were all coming from Detroit.

Radio played an incredible, important role for that early inspiration because – I don’t know who’s from America here, but at that moment Detroit radio was so progressive. Five nights a week you had a guy called Jeff Mills under the name The Wizard playing techno music at eight o'clock on the biggest urban station in Detroit so we were tuning into that. Five days a week at lunchtime there was something called The Midday Cuisine Mix which was basically an hour of house music for everyone to listen to on their lunch breaks.

It was pretty hard not to turn the radio on and hear a Chicago acid house record or Jeff playing a electronic, say a Nitzer Ebb UK industrial record and Ministry and then into hip-hop and then into a Derrick May track and into a Frankie Knuckles track. It was all mixed and mashed together. In that mixing and matching, Jeff Mills would play, in half an hour on the radio, he would go through a hundred records. And then watching Derrick play in the club, mashing and hitting the EQ, that mixing and mashing of music and styles and frequencies was what made the dancefloor go absolutely crazy.

Torsten Schmidt

Who gave you your first break there?

Richie Hawtin

My first break?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, as a DJ.

Richie Hawtin

My girlfriend of the time. She was my biggest fan. She was so determined to get me a DJ job that she drove one of the club owners absolutely paralytic until he finally decided to shut her up by giving me a job. At that moment I think I had some BPMs written on my sleeves to remember what mixed well together and things like that. I was definitely out of my basement before I should have been, but that’s actually still part of how I play. Meaning that I don’t do very much preparation in my music or for new technologies.

When Maschine came out a couple years ago, I think the day after, I set it up at [German techno festival] Time Warp and hammered on it to see what was happening, and the same thing with Push. So sitting at home and practising definitely is good, and I did do that in the early days, but getting in front of a crowd and getting that feedback and that momentum is really where you learn your skills because you’re normally not playing by yourself. Even if you’re in a room by yourself and you’re broadcasting there’s still some kind of connection there. You need that to really go to the next level as any type of performer, to be thrown into strange and exciting situations.

Torsten Schmidt

Can you recall the first time you played outside of Detroit? Or outside of Windsor for that matter?

Richie Hawtin

Probably it was like Toronto or something. At that time the Midwestern United States, up into Toronto down into Cincinnati and Chicago, really had an incredibly vibrant pre-rave scene. So it wasn’t uncommon to jump in the car and drive four, five, six hours, do a gig, come back.

It’s like back to the comment of getting in front of a crowd, usually the first crowd that you play for is maybe a house party or something where your friends are. They’re all your supporters and they’re going to be so excited. It’s going to be, in a way, a magical experience even if you kind of fuck up, but once you go into a bigger situation where it’s not all your friends and they’re going to be critical about how you’re playing and they’re going to stop dancing if you’re playing not so well is another huge step. And that is what was happening as I started to leave Detroit and go in a couple of hours radius, that you had to really be, “OK, if they’re dancing they really like it. They don’t know you. You’re just some stranger that just pulled up.” Take that feedback. Take the good with the bad and take that journey with them.

Torsten Schmidt

Were you ever in Europe before you got to play there?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, I was born in the UK so I spent quite a lot of time there until I was nine or ten years old. I went around ‘88, ‘89 during what they called the Summer of Love in the UK and did some parties and was just checking out how it was.

I don’t think I was actually ready for the first moment I played overseas, because that was another level of anticipation from both sides. It’s outside of your comfort zone. The further away you go from your friends and what you’re used to, the more challenging and more inspiring it can be.

Torsten Schmidt

What were the first places that you played at in Europe?

Richie Hawtin

I think the UK. I had a lot of gigs in the UK in 1990, 1991. I think the first gig in Europe was in Amsterdam. Shortly afterwards was Berlin and Frankfurt up into Hamburg.

That was on the strength of the records I was making at that moment. We had our Plus 8 Records label with myself, John Acquaviva, Kenny Larkin and Daniel Bell. We made a pilgrimage to Europe to play because even though we were in Detroit and surrounded by a lot of incredible labels and records that were coming out from the Detroit guys, of course we were listening to what was coming out from Europe. Also, what was interesting, we could hear how the Detroit records were inspiring European records, and how those records were coming back to us. A lot of our inspiration and my inspiration for the early music was as much from a Derrick May Detroit record as it was a record from Europe that had already been inspired by Derrick May.

So there was the beginnings of that really global language and communication between all these producers. That was really interesting. What we did on the first Plus 8 releases, we actually started to make connections around the world, first with Speedy J in Rotterdam. We would put the names around the label because we really felt global. So it would say Rotterdam, Windsor, London – which was actually London, Ontario – Detroit. That was also the perspective, let’s reach out as far as possible and try to make more connections. Inspire. Be inspired. Be a part of this early global electronic scene.

Torsten Schmidt

What sort of differences that you encountered with the way DJs played overseas compared to what you were used to at home?

Richie Hawtin

That’s a very good point. This mixer I would find quite often around the world. To the right side, the EQ, which was, let’s say the strings of the instruments, they would put screws in the middle there so that you could drop the frequencies but you couldn’t attenuate and gain the frequencies in order to protect the sound systems. There was probably some logic in that idea but I think that was akin to a guitar player going to a show and someone handing them a guitar with two strings, saying, “Do your repertoire!” For a while, I traveled with a screwdriver. When the sound guys weren’t looking, we’d unscrew them and then go for it.

Once promoters started to see the style of how I was playing and Derrick and those guys, you started to see more of those mixers actually have that capability again. They stopped putting screws. Sometimes we brought little EQs that we could add on to the thing. That started to become a style and part of the blueprint of my sound.

Torsten Schmidt

Did you realize any differences in the way the blending and the actual mixing was approached?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. I think when we were first going to the UK it was smoother. Thinking about that, I would say the UK and even Europe had a different philosophy of mixing, both DJ-wise and as in production, at least, from Detroit. Because Detroit had a style, Chicago had a style, New York had a style, both mixing and musically.

Most of the people I started to meet who were producing in Europe were all using early computers. Everybody had an Atari ST. Everybody was arranging everything. I went into a couple of studios and was like, “Here’s my song.” I would press start. Then it would play perfectly on the computer, basically, like the arrangement window from Logic or Ableton now. That was completely alien to the way I was making music. Again, how I’d seen music being made in Detroit when I went to Kevin’s studio, or Derrick’s. They just had all these machines lying around. Most of the time, even if you were going for a coffee, they would just be running. The music would be kind of bubbling in the background. At a certain moment, “I’m going to grab this and press start on the reel-to-reels and jam for 20 minutes or half an hour, afterwards do some editing, capture that live take.”

That comes back to that mixing and mashing [of] your frequencies. Everything was very spontaneous. Back to the DJ mixing. When you have that EQ and you’re putting two records together, throwing the frequencies and playing with them, it was also very spontaneous. Everything seemed to be... Not everything. There were people like us. But somehow it was more calculated.

Torsten Schmidt

These are [Kraftwerk’s] “Die Roboter,” what do you expect?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah [laughs]. You said that, so... Watching and making music like that in the studio is still to this day, and DJing like that, was really a philosophy from the Detroit guys. A philosophy of why I’ve always liked to have many pieces of equipment in front of me as I play so that I can spontaneously follow some kind of weird real-time energy.

Torsten Schmidt

On those earlier releases on collaborations with Dan Bell for example, did you have it in mind that you would not overload the tracks too much so that you would have the extra headroom to play around with it when you actually played it?

Richie Hawtin

I don’t think it was a conscious thing about... At the end of the day, we were making records that would fit into our DJ set. Yes, perhaps, it was an unconscious idea of not having too much information there and leaving room so that two records came together in a nice way.

I think it was still more about creating music that could be left or played or listened to by itself beyond just a DJ track and still have enough room to appreciate the sounds that were in there. Especially, Dan and I were making tracks together or playing music back and forth, it was always those ones that were more stripped down that we both enjoyed. It was always when there was space between the kick and the clap and hi-hats and different shuffles to also open up a little attenuation between sounds that really turned us on.

I also think that, at that time, there weren’t as many possibilities in the computer, of course. We had certain restrictions, either budgetary because we would go to the pawn shop and buy a $50 [Roland TB-]303, something like that to make music with. Or we only had eight channels, or I think we had 12 channels in the first mixer that we had. There was only so much information you could put in there. Even the records I liked at that moment were somehow minimalistic, even pre-making music, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream. All these records have a distinct balance within them. I think it was just following that.

There were sometimes, I remember, when I first learned, everything we were doing was with sync and control voltage. There were no computers in the beginning. There was no MIDI. There was only so many things you could [do]. The 808 has three triggers out, the 909 has one trigger out. When you have those two things running your synthesizers, you only actually can do four parts. You’re forced to do that.

I remember trying to learn MIDI, and for the life of me, I don’t know why, I couldn’t understand it, I had this crazy little sequencer with a screen about this big. It took me, it felt like, six months. One day the penny dropped of how all this MIDI stuff worked. The first thing that I did was make all these incredibly complex tracks with 32 different lines and little notes here and there. I liked it but quickly devolved back into using the smaller amount of things and music that somehow didn’t feel too complicated and allowed me play around within it. I probably should have said it before, I love music, the way you feel, especially, on the dancefloor. There’s space between all these sounds. You can climb in there and run around between the beats. That’s a great dancefloor experience for me.

Torsten Schmidt

How many records did you travel with at that time?

Richie Hawtin

Probably about 100 to 150. At this time they had these incredible 50-count record boxes. I think Hard Wax was making them from Berlin. They must have weighed 20 pounds by themselves. I think three of those, 150 [records]. That was when I was traveling by myself, too. The worst thing would be going to the airport and getting out of the baggage claim, landing somewhere and you didn’t have the money, it was at the time when all the airports started to charge for their carts, because at one point they were all free, and I’d try to get out. Once you were outside of the airport, it was OK, there was usually, hopefully, someone there to pick you up.

It was also a different philosophy of… I had other DJ friends, and I don’t know if it’s a European-American difference, a North American difference, who always, somehow, planned a little bit more. They could make do with 50 records. But I always wanted to have lots of different possibilities. At that moment, I was probably doing more longer shows. It was typical to play three, four, or five hours, or six to eight hours. You needed different material. Also at that time, I was touring even more than I do now. Sometimes, I would do 12 gigs in a row. You try to do 12 gigs in a row with 30 or 40 records. By gig five, you’re so tired of the music that you need a reboot, so it was keeping myself excited and fresh, so that every night I could go on a slightly different trip, and then I could play well because the more inspired, the more energized, the more excited I am about playing the music I have, the better the show. Not necessarily the better the show technically, just the better the show is in its flow and my energy and my connection to the crowd. That becomes a great show, beyond technical considerations.

Torsten Schmidt

When did you start taking other human beings along rather than travelling alone with your record box?

Richie Hawtin

Probably around ‘98. Around that time, I had moved from... [To Itaru] You want to show the next slide? I had moved from that mixer to this PMC—50 mixer, which was actually a Japanese-made mixer from Vestax, and it was one of the first mixers which had a little effects loop. It was kind of like a send and return. I was doing this Decks, EFX and 909 tour and album, and carting records around was one thing but carting a whole bunch of equipment... At that point, it was a 909. A lot of the time we brought our own mixer because not everybody had this mixer, and we also then brought an Ensoniq DP4 effects processor, so that’s when I started bringing someone to help me with that. I was still doing the soundchecks and everything myself, but it was just impossible for me to take five or six check-on bags and make it through a tour in the beginning.

Torsten Schmidt

How important is having an actual human being with you that is a sounding board and another social person?

Richie Hawtin

Now I love travelling with my team, but at that moment, I think it was more of a necessity for the equipment. I loved jumping on a plane by myself and getting off at a weird destination for the first time, and I still like that, and especially as we started to take more equipment and do more rigorous tours, then it became more beneficial to have someone helping and also have someone as a friend and support because things were just moving at a really high rate. What’s funny about those times was we were one of the first touring DJs who were always bringing lots of equipment, and I remember on that Decks, EFX and 909 tour, we had such a struggle, and the promoters were all complaining. “Why do you have to bring your equipment? Why do we have to go to the club at 9pm for a soundcheck? Can’t you just show up with your records and play?”

We went through that tour, and then after the tour we never had the problem again. They were like, “Make sure Rich brings his stuff. We love the show.” But it was really… everybody at that moment, or most people at that moment in the DJ world were just complacent. It was the mid to late 90s, the scene was huge, and it was like, “Yeah, just pay the DJs the $1,000. Show up half an hour before, and we’ll give you a thing of vodka. Play and see you later.”

You were lucky if you had transportation sometimes. Actually, transportation was great before the gig, but then after the gig, they’re sweeping up the club, and you’re like, “OK, where was my hotel?” If you were lucky to get back to the hotel, at least 50% of the time when you woke up in the morning, it was like, “How do I get to the airport?” Luckily, things have changed on that. Soundchecks, we very rarely do a gig now without a soundcheck, especially when we get into the larger shows.

Torsten Schmidt

What was your rate of oversleeping in the morning when you needed to get to the airport?

Richie Hawtin

My rates?

Torsten Schmidt

Not your rate, but what quota – how many times were you left in a hotel room and wre like, “Fuck, how do I get to the airport?” And not speaking the language?

Richie Hawtin

I would say in the late ‘90s, mid-90s, 50% of the time. It was like, “Amazing gig, high five, see you next time at the club.”

Torsten Schmidt

At what stage did you consider getting representation?

Richie Hawtin

Like management and stuff? I was always adamant I didn’t want a manager. I was like, “Why do I need someone to make my own decisions?” It seemed ridiculous to be honest, but about three or four, five years ago, I had allowed a friend who had been intertwined in my life and my career on and off since 1994, he had gone into management and had gone into a whole bunch of different things. At that moment, I was like, there’s just too much stuff going on in my life to handle it by myself, and also because there’s so many, even in that moment before he came on, there were so many projects going on that I was jumping into that it was sometimes really hard, and I was always writing things down of where I wanted to go next.

There was no shortage of ideas, but you’d look up and another year just went by and I haven’t been able to even start that other project. That’s where management and even bringing a greater team together made sense to me. I still have a weird feeling about management too early on. There’s a big push now. Everyone wants a manager because everybody else has a manager and there’s all this competition. You need people out there flying your flag while you’re DJing or while you’re producing music or while you’re in the studio. I think for a long time that was just my friends who were around me, and that worked enough. You need those supporters. You need a couple of flags, but I think you have to be careful who you bring on too soon, especially in the early years. It’s very important to find your own creative direction, and you also need to make some bad choices and mistakes before you bring someone on board who may then start alleviating some of those mistakes or pointing you in the right direction, even though you wanted to go in this direction.

I think that’s why finally I brought on my friend, Ben, because I had already had for 20 years created a very strong direction and presence and lineage that I totally understood, he totally understood, and we can very quickly, easily work together at a very high momentum because things move really, really rapidly in what I’m doing and just this whole scene now, just with the way music is distributed with the amount of gigs around the world. It’s very easy for even the newcomer or someone early in their career to start quickly travelling around the world and getting this remix and that remix. In that way, you definitely need support.

Torsten Schmidt

You’ve seen different waves of a lot of different stakeholders and interest groups entering our world and disappearing again. Obviously, they play by the rules of the corporations and so on, so they would come into a situation with all their personnel and it gets really official. I guess it’s relatively tempting for a young artist to go, “Oh, unless I have something similar on my side, I’m not going to get anywhere.” What are traps to avoid with your experience?

Richie Hawtin

There’s definitely that push. You see your friends around you. They’ve released two records. You’ve released two records, but that person’s doing it quicker because they have representation or something. Very early on we had a number of offers to do deals, to buy Plus 8 Records completely out, to license our records and do special remixes and make them more commercially successful. John Acquaviva and I really tried to stay very authentic and very much in control of everything, to follow our own idea and dream and keep our own identity. Over those years, we saw other labels come and other artists, and we’re always like, “Oh my God. Maybe we should have done something. They’re going so high already. Oh my God. They’re so successful. Wouldn’t it be great to have those opportunities.” At least 50% of the time, a couple of years later, you would look around and those people have disappeared. It’s very…

Torsten Schmidt

It’s like the jocks in high school.

Richie Hawtin

It’s like the what?

Torsten Schmidt

It’s like the jocks in high school.

Richie Hawtin

I already said that Derrick and those guys are probably more of jocks than I am, and they’re still around [laughs].

Torsten Schmidt

I wasn’t referring to them, but they are jocks.

Richie Hawtin

No, no [laughs]. There’s no easy way or short way. So many times, I’ve sat there and thought... I remember when Carl Craig was asked to go on tour with Derrick May. It must have been 1989. We were all just starting out. He was going to do one Rhythim is Rhythim live show, and he was working with Derrick and doing some records. I was like, “Fuck, how come Carl gets to do that and I don’t get to do that shit?” But everything comes to you if you, I think, follow your own pathway and somehow do it on your own terms. Things need time. Don’t get frustrated by seeing other people coming up faster or quicker. That’s always going to happen. That still frustrates me sometimes. You just get back and focus and take one step at a time, and suddenly it’s one year later and you’ve made some kind of development.

As long as you’re noticing that you’re making a development, suddenly it’s five or ten years, I’ve been doing this 25 years. When I sit down and think about all the things that have happened, then it feels [like] wow, that’s a long time. Because I’m so focused, it’s been an incredible journey that seems to have just been a little blip. One thing leads to another. You meet another connection and then suddenly you meet someone. You’re like, “Oh my God. OK.” This is the moment where that idea that’s been sitting over there needs to come back to the forefront.” If you’re not in control of those ideas or if there’s someone leaning on you too much to take you somewhere that you don’t want to go or taking you too fast or too left or too right, make sure you’re working with someone that you trust. Make sure you’re working with someone who’s listening to you. Make sure that you’re still in control of the decision making. Use the people you’re working with, listen to them also and have a fresh perspective. Don’t do something that you really don’t want to do because you’re going to do that anyway. We all do stuff that we regret. If you do, keep moving forward.

Torsten Schmidt

Speaking of regrets, by its very nature, temptation comes in very tantalizing forms. Every couple of years those forms take on massive checks as well. How do you learn to say no?

Richie Hawtin

Yes, I think that’s... there’s no easy payday in this, well, at least my type of music. I was reading [RBMA participants’] bios and you’re all doing totally different things. From hip-hop to electronic to techno to vocal experimentation. If you create something and it has greater potential and someone offers to help you on that, whether it’s a tour or whether it’s money, every different project and idea has a different momentum, a different direction, a different destination. If it makes sense to take a big check or work with a bigger company, then do that.

A friend of mine, Claire [Boucher, AKA] Grimes, was doing her own independent stuff. She made was using GarageBand and this kind of stuff. Now she’s signed to Jay Z’s Roc Nation. That made sense to her. She wants to reach more people and I can also understand that. Her music is absolutely beautiful. It’s also, somehow, catchy and should be taken to a wider audience.

Torsten Schmidt

Didn’t she recently scrap the album?

Richie Hawtin

No, I think there was some misunderstanding. She hasn’t scrapped the album. Every time you go to another level you’re going to find new challenges. I would imagine that Claire’s found new challenges going from a small, independent Montreal-based label to 4AD and now to Roc Nation. Again, as long as you understand the implications of those decisions and as long as you have some good people around you to, on the management side, advise you or on the friend’s side, support you. I would say my friends and my management and my team, those all go together. You’ve got to trust your own decision and you’ve got to trust the people around you and then you just got to go for it.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess in those situations...

Richie Hawtin

How do I say no to big checks? I don’t get so many offers of big checks, I don’t think.

Torsten Schmidt

A big check is a different thing depending on the situation.

Richie Hawtin

Yes. I love being in control of my own destiny and my own career. I have my own booking agency, I have my own label and I’m very much hands-on with everything. When we wanted to do a Plastikman show and scale up into this big lighting video and animation rig, we didn’t try to find the best company to do that. We just found friends around us and made that a new section of our company and built a new team. That’s how I like to do it. That’s why I’m so interested, since the very beginning, in the mixer and the technology I use. The computers and the creativity of making something, of performing and all the other parts of the puzzle around that. About the lights, about the promotion, about the marketing. All of this makes sense to me. All of that is part of my creative output or thought train.

Torsten Schmidt

To the degree that you were, at times, participating in the business side of the technology as well, right?

Richie Hawtin

Yes. Most of the time that has happened when I’ve run across some type of technology that can help me perform or do something better. Those inventors or technicians need some kind of help, whether that’s my support in marketing or using it. At times that has also been on an investment level and putting my money where my mouth is. There’s actually a good [photo] [gesturing to slideshow]. It only looks old because I have no hair. The computer I’m using is an old Sony but that was the first version of Final Scratch, which became Traktor and Serato and all the DVS systems that are out there and that was running on a operating system called BOS. That was somewhere along traveling the world and connecting to interesting and cool people.

At that time, my partner Joe Acquaviva met a kid in his bedroom who had hooked his computer up to his turntable and was recording his voice and then scratching his voice and goofing around. We just thought it was… Ten years of carting three crates of 50 records around, mostly by myself, wasn’t the part of the job or my career that I really enjoyed. To see this technology where we could [have] MP3s and carry around about a 1,000 tracks, that was the first epiphany of why we wanted to be involved in that. There was a kid, Mark-Jan Bastian, in his bedroom with a couple of friends but they needed some money to boot up that idea and put some more development time into it and create 100 little Final Scratch boxes, and we were like, “Yes, let’s do it.”

I’m involved in some other technology companies, [and] that’s pretty much the ethos today. If I put some money somewhere to develop a piece of technology that I can use, or software, and it allows me to play better, entertain everyone better and I have more fun, and maybe I play better because I’m having more fun, it’s a success. It doesn’t have to make money. It’s also my belief that if it really does energize and inspire me, that there’s probably more people out there who have also thought about that technology or want that technology or are going to need it once they see it. That’s really an exciting circle to be in.

Torsten Schmidt

As we briefly cut to commercials, what are those other companies, if you care to tell us some of them?

Richie Hawtin

I’m working with Livid Technologies, they’re from Texas and they create a lot of very interesting MIDI devices and MIDI components to create your own controllers. I work with them. I helped to develop this [points to slideshow] called the CNTRL:R. That one’s more of a business relationship. Business, as in I’m part of the company. I’ve had a long-standing relationship, non-business, with Allen & Heath. Just sharing ideas and trying to hang out with them and tell them and show them how I play, hoping that new features will be developed or put into their new mixers that I can use. Having new records in my virtual DJ crate is one thing, but having new knobs and a new Push controller also is just as inspiring.

It’s very hard for me to disconnect music and technology. I think that’s been there, that’s how I started without the computer. As an introverted kid, the technology and the computers was the thing that allowed me to reach other people and communicate and reach out beyond what I am physically able to do.

Torsten Schmidt

When Final Scratch was around, it quickly got very ideological, can you elaborate a little bit on that war?

Richie Hawtin

Yes. You can imagine, at that moment, we had Plus 8, we had Minus, as in my record companies. Up until 1998, ‘99, even around 2000, around Final Scratch, we also owned, John Acquaviva and I, a record pressing plant in Toronto. Speaking about big corporations, we were somehow quite vertically integrated. At that time in America, we couldn’t get our records made fast enough, we weren’t happy with the quality, so we were like, “Fuck it. Let’s buy a record pressing plant.” Which means buying two machines, it wasn’t a big operation, but we quickly found out why it was hard to get good quality vinyl – because running machines that have been around for two or three decades and keeping them all in working order was a huge pain in the ass and a headache. It was an interesting part of the story.

When we were in the bedroom with Mark-Jan who was developing Final Scratch, we didn’t think of the negative implications or the technology. We were like, “We want this. We want this now. How long’s it going to take to develop?” We went with it. I remember when we released the technology and did our first press release, the whole room was like, “What!” Everyone was blown away. Then the penny started to drop. You could see everyone’s face go from excitement to horror. This was at Midem, one of the biggest music conferences of the time. Suddenly, we had this huge backlash from all of our friends, who we’d actually been doing business with for 10 years. Our record store friends were pissed off at us, our distributor friends were pissed off at us. Some people said they wouldn’t carry our records now. It was a crazy moment in the development because nobody knew what was coming. It was like we had unleashed the crack and it was like, “OK, nobody’s going to be able to control our destiny now.”

It was back to the comment I made about the clubs. In the ‘90s, the whole industry was oiled and it was pumping out mostly really good records, but it was our industry. It was printing money. Asking club owner to do soundchecks and bringing new equipment in, and then having something that was going to be an alternative to vinyl and/or CD, and all these networks and everything that had been set up for years, was threatening to a lot of people. This was also around the time when MP3s and players were starting to come out, I think this was a little bit pre-iPod. I had just been to an MP3 conference and got one of the first little devices, like a Walkman, and the idea of music being more mobile and being able to have 500 records or 1000 records on my computer or in my pocket was so exciting. We were like, “OK.”

This probably comes back to a bit of my personality, I’m a bleeding optimist of how technology can help and transform our lives for the better. I definitely am not dumb enough [not] to say that sometimes that doesn’t go exactly the right way, but I have to follow that belief for my life, for my performances, for my companies, and follow that path. That goes back to managers and all this. It takes a while to really figure out what you want to do with your life and with your creativity. Even once you have found it, you need to spend some time before all that kind of gels together and you really understand what your mission is. It’s important to have some of that time to yourself on that kind of personal journey before you bring too many people into the works.

Torsten Schmidt

On the mere technological side, how do we get from there to all the stuff that you have in front of you right now?

Richie Hawtin

I don’t think it’s that different, in a way, to where I began. We’ll go through the pictures quick, with my relationship with Allen & Heath. I was going to go through the… but I can talk through it. [Pointing to slideshow] That’s where I’m at now, which basically is boiling down how to play with records, how to add on extra percussion, and affect all that in a way that something new and exciting comes through the speakers every time I play, or most times I play, hopefully.

We have, if I can quickly explain it, to the left you have Ableton Push, then you have the XONE:92 mixer. Why I use the 92 is that I think it is one of the best sounding mixers out there, and also the important feature is that it actually has six channels, a lot of mixers only have four. The very important feature is the two effect sends at the top, which I can send into the computer, into Ableton, and do flanges and delays and resampling, and things like that.

Next to it, you have two Traktor X1s. These are the older versions, and I kind of like that you have four buttons in the middle [rather] than one or two on the newer versions. Then, you have an RME Fireface. There’s lots of audio interfaces out there, there’s lots of smaller ones and more convenient, but we’ve over the years done a lot of testing of what sounds better, and for the price-to-performance ratio, this thing sounds absolutely incredible compared to some other devices. It handles some of the lower frequencies better than other things, and a lot of the time I’m playing, I have four tracks going on top of each other and some loops. The combination of the sound of the 92 and the way you can kind of push that into slight distortion, and how the frequencies are handled on the UFX, it handles how I play, really.

That’s part of that finding about who are, or how you’re playing or what your pathway is. The setup isn’t perhaps great for everyone, but many people could take the setup and do something completely different, but because of how and why I play, this really is kind of boiled down to giving me the most potential, and giving the best audio experience to the listeners. Then on my computer I’m just running Traktor and Ableton in the background. I don’t sync. You can sync both together of course via MIDI clock, but I don’t. I set the tempos at the same, and then I start Ableton when I play, because some of my tracks are actually mostly… the computer of course beatmatches, but some of them are out of phase and have a different feeling. I find when you clock both programs together and you’re doing drum rolls on top, it doesn’t always sound good, so I actually have a couple of buttons that I can push and pull both tempos independently and kind of find interesting alignments, especially if you’re using shuffles or thirty-second notes.

That’s a little bit – not that we want to get into the DJ “can you mix or beatmatch” debate, but what is nice about putting two records together is that they aren’t always on time and you do have some nice slips and push and pull moments between two records where really interesting things happen. Having both of these programs running, and having a way to independently offset or un-align the drums that I’m doing and the rhythms and all the records, that’s the human part that I want to keep in there.

There’s also – a lot of you use Push? Ableton Push? No, no, no, OK. Well, a friend of mine’s developed, we have this thing called performance mode, which if anybody wants it, they can ask me later and I can send it to them. If you click, well, you can’t see it anyway, but basically it turns all the 64 pads into a direct access of your drum bank, so that you can kind of play live and go beyond just 16 drum pads and do all the things that you can normally do in sequencer modes. If that makes sense to any Push fans, I can show you later.

Another piece of interesting technology, which not everybody agrees on, is... I thought it was started, one sec. Does anyone know about the RADR stuff I’m doing, and Twitter DJ? Anyone ever heard of that? OK, well, yes no. What we’re running here, is it running? Why am I not seeing it at the top? Oh, OK. Yep, got it. There we go, thanks. So a couple of years ago I was with… anyway, I think the days of the secret record that makes you a good DJ and better than the person next to you are a little bit over. I really want to push that it’s beyond the track you play, or even the tracks, that it’s something beyond that. It’s the technology you use and how you’re playing music. I’m very open about sharing any kind of software that we’ve developed or explaining how all this is working. If anyone wants to see the routing or look at the computer, go for it.

To continue with that transparency, we developed this thing called Twitter DJ, which we now call RADR, and what happens is as I’m playing my records, it’s listening. Anytime I play something for more than, I think, 30 seconds, it actually posts to Twitter. I have an @rhawtin live account, so if you’re at home or if you’re in the club, you can actually see what’s being played. Then you can also later go to the website called radr.dj and see the different sets that I’ve played and see other users that are actually playing at that moment. It’s a way to share what you’re playing, and it can be very useful for promoting the records and helping record companies. I just like going sometimes to radr.dj, you have this world map and you can see who’s playing live around the world and start seeing who’s playing what. Yeah, I love that feature, I think probably because the electronic music scene was pretty small when I first started, so to see that in real time now in all these far away places is absolutely incredible.

Torsten Schmidt

Does it automatically notify other people when their track is played as well?

Richie Hawtin

It doesn’t. I think a lot of producers follow the @rhawtin Twitter feed so that they can see when I’m playing it, because you see people retweeting it, but we’re continuing the development and that’s what we would love to see. I’d love, as a producer or a record label owner, to be able to wake up in the morning and say your track was played 365 times last night, it seems to be a hot zone in Chicago because it was played 30 times there. Then use that to help run your record company better, or just to let people know about new tracks and new producers.

That’s also, because you were maybe bridging onto some conversations earlier about what’s happening with the electronic music scene right now, a lot of large corporations are coming in and offering lots of money to buy companies and buy festivals. Being the optimist, I see that there’s some great advantages to that, because it’s going to help take the scene and grow it to another stage. At the same time, I think it’s very important that we all find the right balance of keeping our independence and staying in control, and taking the right opportunities when they come. Using this type of technology, RADR, and being as transparent as possible, I hope that it allows more people to stay independent, and that we can work together to keep the scene growing and with the foundation that we’ve already created.

Why is the electronic music scene so big right now? It hasn’t really been because large corporations have helped us. Over the last 20 years it’s basically been small labels and dreamers and people who have a lot of inspired energy, working together and sharing ideas all over the world and creating an incredible independent structure. The vibrancy of the scene needs to be retained with that somehow. This is a great forum for that. You guys are making connections to the far corners of the world just in this room. As long as there’s some groups in here and pockets that stay in touch and continue to collaborate or just share their music or ideas and that can continue to make that mesh of independent, forward-thinking people even tighter and stronger.

Torsten Schmidt

I think that’s something to marinate on for a second.

Richie Hawtin

You guys can, because I’m going to be here again tomorrow, but you guys can jump in if you have any kind of questions because sometimes I’m at these things and on the other side and you want to ask something and when you wait until the Q&A later, it’s like OK, maybe it doesn’t actually make sense and then you don’t ask it and you’re pissed about it for a couple of days, so jump in at any time.

Torsten Schmidt

With that whole commercial interest being thrown into our world here, there’s also a tendency, because it is more marketable, to put people on a pedestal to a degree. While a lot of it, for a long time, was about focus on the music and having as few “rockisms” in there as possible. Now, you find yourself on stage quite a bit where, the classic Jesus pose might be the start of…

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, the electronic music world is pretty much working like any other music industry now, like the rock industry. I think it’s not exactly the same, but other music industries have been around for so long and they were doing certain things right and some of that’s been assimilated. When I first got into the scene, if it [had been] the scene it is right now, I don’t know if I would [have got] into it. If I was that kid that I was then, I wouldn’t have had the balls to try to get up on stage and be a superstar DJ. I was lucky that it kind of developed into this bigger scene and into a different type of scene as I was developing as a musician, as a performer, and it’s been very natural for me to evolve and develop in how I play and how I perform.

We actually have three different type of shows. Wow, finally we’re getting into it! [Laughs] We’re talking about team members, and when we’re actually organizing and thinking about where we’re playing, we’re looking at where we want to go, we’re looking at offers and venues. We have what we call the DJ show, we have the DJ-plus show, and we have the festival show. These are all to… on everything you were just saying, this is the world that we live in now, which probably somehow, in my own way, I’ve been a part of developing and becoming less, let’s say, I don’t know, underground. Let’s say, coming out from the DJ booth in the corner and going to center stage.

I’ve always liked having as many people listen to my music as possible. Even when I was first doing a May Day rave in Germany in 1991 and 1992 and there was like four or eight thousand people in front of me, I was absolutely petrified. I kind of hated playing those big parties, but at the same time, I loved it if could get the moment where they were all dancing. That was like, wow, I can touch this many people – as long as I didn’t play something like Carl Craig’s “Bug in the Bassbin,” which was a prototype of drum and bass and the Germans didn’t like that record at that moment.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, not all of them.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, well the ones on the dancefloor didn’t like it at that moment. Over the years, I’ve definitely been very open to trying to reach more people. I understand, well, I don’t think my music is that commercial. I think it has a certain… it can touch more people than I play to at this moment, but it’s never going to be a major label kind of, big-room, top 100 and top 10 DJ thing. I love what I do and I want to stay true to how my sound and how I perform develops, but I want to find ways to get people to come and see me or go at the festival and say hey, what’s going on over there? I want to check that guy out. Sounds kind of interesting. There’s a lot of, not necessarily a lot of lights going, but something’s happening over there.

That’s kind of why we developed these three shows. If I’m in a club, it’s the club show and it’s basically [inaudible], who was just sitting here, it’s me and him getting on the plane with this equipment. We show up, we play for 500 to 2,000 people and it’s about music. Most clubs have pretty good LED displays and stuff like that, but it’s a music experience.

When we get to DJ-plus, we probably scale up to on the amount of people, so you’re looking at 1,000 upwards to 8,000, 10,000. We had lights because every club has lights, but it’s always been my belief that if you think about the lights and someone’s running the lights who understands how you play, you can make a better experience. I don’t think that’s rocket science.

There’s that, and then we go to festival show which basically then brings in a visual component. Again, this is just thinking about a festival experience. There’s more festivals now than ever that have great sound systems, but if you’re in the middle of a field, no matter what you do, you need to add something to the experience to, I think, bring it into a fully well-rounded show. Especially if you have no delay lines for the sounds and it’s all just coming from the front and you’re 15,000 people back and I’m looking like a little action figure. How do you bring that connection to those people?

So then we add, on top with the lights, we add Itaru, or my other friend Ali Demirel, and bring in a visual component. Again, this is like, if you don’t bring your own people, most of these festivals have these big LED shows, the screens behind you, and most of the time, because they’d invested in all this money and all these lights, everything is going to be used, and so if you’re not in control of that part of the experience, unless you tell them to turn it all off, which they’re not going to do, probably, then it’s already beyond the music experience. We choose to take control of that whole experience and work together so that we have a very distinct aesthetic and synchronicity between what you hear and what you’re seeing. Sometimes that synchronicity can be as developed as the Plastikman shows, which maybe we’re going to talk about tomorrow, where there’s real MIDI data going back and forth to the trigger things, or with the DJ shows having material on both sides that we feel goes together and actually performing together and allow the visuals to take on more of the feeling of a great musical DJ set.

I have my records, Itaru has his visuals, I know kind of what he’s doing behind me, he knows usually how I’m going to begin and end or something, and we try to create an experience that has moments of synchronicity, but always a continued aesthetic connection together. For the DJ shows, this is actually, it has to be this way, because I’m getting one or two thousand new demos and records every week or two, I’m going through all this, so we can play a couple of times over a month together and every every show is completely different. It has to have this flexibility to be able to evolve every time you play.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you organize all that music and how do you stay on top of it?

Richie Hawtin

I oscillate between being very much on top and completely delayed and behind. There’s just so much music coming and honestly, it’s very hard to stay on top and give everything the time it needs. I don’t have anyone filtering my records, so any demo or any promo that comes in, I listen to. Sometimes, it’s listening sessions of 5 or 6,000 records and I’m going really fast. I just go on iTunes and it’s like, yeah, what, three, four seconds? If something grabs me, I throw it in another crate and then once I’ve gone through all the records, I go back to the first crate again. I do another five. You know what I usually do then? Just check that there’s nothing random happening in the song, which you don’t want to be too surprised when you’re playing, and then I do some very quick meta tagging. Basically, I’ll use the word bomb a lot, and then techno minimal, tech house, house, maybe after hours, and ambient, and then, it goes into the computer, and the next time I listen to it is when I play it.

That’s why we can only prepare so much. Probably, that’s because there’s just not enough time to go through everything, but even when I had my 50 records, I would do the same thing. I would go and then I’d write some notes on it and the notes kind of help me navigate. Then, the covers help me navigate a little bit, so I’m probably a little bit more lost than I used to be, but I have the metadata. Then, it was just like, go play. Sometimes, you used to put a record on and be like, “OK, that’s not the right record. I can do that much faster with this,” so, when I’m playing, sometimes, I’m quickly pre-listening and then I just like Derrick May used to do, just jam it in and hope I’m on for a good ride, and if not, I’ll loop it or change it or add some percussion on top.

Torsten Schmidt

To which degree do you reckon folks feel obligated to just use all those knobs when they’re on stage, because there’s a massive stage, you’re there on your own, and the knobs are your only friends keeping you company?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, it’s like that. It used to be amazing when you had records, because anytime you didn’t know what to do, any time you need to have a drink of Coca-Cola, or smoke, if you smoke, or most of the time for me, I just got nervous and didn’t know what to do. You just turn around and put your back to the audience. It was amazing. Now I can. I was like, “I can’t believe this.” That’s another part of the development. There was big shows back then, but the amount of bigger shows and productions and things that we’re doing now, this all also came out of how the scene was developing. “OK, well, we’re not turning out back to the audience now. Now we’re starting to become more like an entertainer, because people are watching and expecting us to do something.”

Why do I have the equipment set up this way? Sometimes, I like being able to move around the equipment. I like that there’s something to watch. I think about this. I’m like, “OK, the scene’s beyond just people.” We have three different types of shows. You’re still in the nightclub sometimes and you’re with 500 people, mostly with their eyes closed into a purely music experience, but it’s not just about that. So you have to understand that when you guys get on stage you’re a performer. People coming to see something and you’ve got to find your own comfort level of how you’re going to be a performer.

I’m not saying that you have to do the “Jesus pose” or do crazy shit. It may be that you are Kraftwerk style and doing everything very precise, but whatever you do is going to be somehow involved in what’s, you know, the kind of sound that you are using, what kind of equipment. All this comes together, and it also goes back to that point about maybe not being careful about who you bring on board too soon, who you’re traveling with, which manager you have, because that’s got to be really pure. It’s got to be honest. It’s like when you see... I’m sure we’ve all seen things on YouTube and photos of DJs or performers where people are saying, “OK, what the hell is this person doing? Is that person actually playing? Are they pressing auto sync or whatever?” I think what it is on some of those photos is the person isn’t somehow being honest about how they play. The equipment should magnify who you are and what you’re doing, and if you do that in the right way, then you start really connecting with people in a true way. And people can feel that. If you’re trying to go up really fast and you’re trying to make a shortcut, someone is going to figure it out sooner or later.

Torsten Schmidt

How would young Richie feel if he had done a track and sent it to now-Richie and he sees on RADR that the track is being played, and then listens to the set and goes like, “Hang on,” there’s about one loop that made it in there and the rest he just used as a basis to fuck around with?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure that happens because there’s definitely tracks I’m playing which I only play the first eight bars or I don’t go after three minutes because the track goes in a completely opposite direction. But yeah, I think that’s just the way I play and once you put out... I would have been pissed if someone had been doing this to my tracks earlier on. You know, you make a song... I’m sure there’s some producers who make songs that are beats and baselines and that’s the purpose and that’s great, but there’s people putting all their energy and all their emotions to, you know, that song, how it develops over seven minutes, and you want to hear it from point A, from the beginning to end. And that’s a valid point, but once your baby is released into the public domain or into the industry, I think you have to be open-minded and free with what their usage is.

I think the more open-minded you are, I think that’s healthy for the industry, people being able to re-appropriate and sample and mix and match and see where it goes. I never used to let my music be remixed, but on the new Plastikman album Dixon called up, he said, “Hey Rich, I love this track, but the kick can’t play in the club. The kick is shit for a club.” Well, it wasn’t made for a club. It was to listen to on your headphones at home.

Torsten Schmidt

Isn’t that what he always says?

Richie Hawtin

I thought it was a unique experience with him. So he basically had taken it, put a kick on, and was playing it, and he’s like “Well, can I have the parts, so that I can actually make this better, because I really want to play your track?” That’s great. So my kick sucked but he made it better for his usage and I think that’s a good story in that type of situation.

Torsten Schmidt

On that note, how did DJ etiquette change on the night? I mean, you were talking about your May Day experiences. At that time there were certain rules about what to play and what not to play depending on who was on before or after you, and the actual changeover was a lot smoother because it was basically putting your last record on and the next guy just took over the next turntable.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, there’s a number of things with that. I think it still happens in the more commercial side of the electronic music scene where I hear people have certain setlists and you can’t DJ before or after, can’t play this record because that DJ is going to play those ten records in that order, or at least there’s certain things he or she likes to get to. So it does happen, but I think there’s so much more music available now that it doesn’t happen as often, but for sure, there’s a respect level. If I love the Tale of Us remix or track ... One of the tracks they did for Minus that I played every set for eight, nine months, if I’m playing before or after them I’m not going to play that record. That’s their record. They should play it.

Or I’ll ask them, sometimes I don’t always like to play my own music so... But the other part of that, the one thing that I don’t like about these type of setups and especially why we mostly, whenever we can, do a soundcheck is that our equipment is there set up, and that crossover can be as smooth and respectful as possible, because the worst thing... I hate coming on after a DJ and we’re forced to plug in and plug out. Sometimes this happens because you’re in a tiny club. Also, sometimes we’re traveling with some of the other gang from my Minus label and that actually makes things smoother because we know their setup and we can kind of... They’re going to use those two channels, and then they finish and then I just bring one thing up and we have a nice smooth transition. Then they leave the stage. Then we finish. Things like that.

When we first started our events in Ibiza called ENTER, that was my rule: everybody has to go to soundcheck, set their equipment up, and they can’t touch it until the club closes, because I don’t want to see anyone, other than people dancing, in the booth. But that was thrown out on night one, when we realized that there just wasn’t space for four setups. But it’s a very important thing to think about that respect, and the hand-off, because it’s not as commonplace now for DJs to play these extended eight or nine, ten hour sets. There’s more larger venues and people putting up lineups for eight or ten people, so it’s not only about one of the artists. It’s about that flow, and if you respect that, it actually can heighten the experience for everybody.

When you go into festival shows, that gets into another level of complications because you’re bring different lights on and this DJ has this LED display and this one has that and it can get into a show off of who’s going to have more lights and this and that. So there are a lot of complications and challenges that you start to get into as you scale up on any of these shows.

Torsten Schmidt

Like my man Puff says, “More money, more problems.” [Laughs] On that note, we are talking about the visual side of it, as you hinted at, tomorrow, and we’ll talk about how to match what’s happening sonically with what you are actually seeing, but are there any specific questions on the DJing part that you should answer now?

Richie Hawtin

Anything with what we’ve talked about: DJing, companies, controllers, or random. I’m totally open.

Audience member

Hi Richie. Thank you very much being here, telling us all this. For me, Sheet One is pretty special record. It’s one of those records you play when you come out from the disco, from the club. It’s a chill out and relax [record]. For me, it’s very special with the trippy sounds and everything. I was wondering, you growing up, going always to Detroit and playing this hard, fast techno – how do you make the transition? How do you stop, take the time to build this record and just actually understand it and put it out? How was that time?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. That moment... There was a lot of things going on. In 1993 there was a lot of great 12”s coming out with good club tracks. More banging techno records, and there were people making CDs and compilations and everyone was doing an album, but all the albums were were just these club tracks, one, two, three, four, kind of a greatest hits. I didn’t feel that it was very inspiring, to be honest. At the club I loved hearing those tracks, but when I went home, I wanted to have a different experience.

And, probably, Sheet One was related more to the end of my sets in Detroit because I would always play six, seven, eight hours, and the last two hours were always really magical. Just before the sun was coming up, a lot of the... We’re only talking about four, five hundred people, but a lot of the people had maybe left and you’re there with like a hundred people, where pretty much you knew everybody and then you could start playing records slower, or I used to, later on, play one of my tracks, “Panic Attack” at the normal speed and then later slow it down with my hand, and then play it at 33 [RPM].

And everybody was like, that’s why it’s called Plastikman, everybody was starting to, like, everybody was loose and hallucinating and yeah, really open to frequencies and rhythms, and that’s really where that record came. It was for that moment after, you know, if that clubnight had continued for another two or three hours, if people had finished their energy of dancing but still wanted to keep hearing and they were lying on the dancefloor as the sun came up, that was kind of the record for them. The rhythm was there, kind of like the echoes of the night, and then there was just like the bubbling acidic lines that were kind of more for the brain. It’s a very Detroit record.

Audience member

This is more on the production side, but you were talking about how people from Detroit, and also you, were doing less arrangement on the computer and were really using machines and recording live takes and then editing them. I was wondering, with a track like Plastikman’s “Spastik” or something, how much of that is edited down? I work kind of the same way and I always wonder how deep to get into editing.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. There’s a cross-point where too much editing becomes like arrangement. There’s still tracks in the archives that I tried and tried over and over again to release, but the live take just wasn’t good enough, or there wasn’t enough good parts, or once you put it together you started to hear... It just changed the feeling. You know, I remember “Spastik" was, I think, 28 minutes long, but there was really, I think, three edits, or four. It was basically intro, and then seven, six-and-a-half, seven minutes of one take, and then outro.

And if you’re really into it, you play a long time. I have two DATs of a track called “Overkill” by Circuit Breaker which was on my Probe label. The take was an hour and a half. It took a long time to edit. At the end it was only two or three edits, again, but it was like, “Oh my God, I love this part.” It cannot be 20 minutes long. I did a System 7 remix once and I think that was 18 minutes because I loved it all. I was like, fuck it.

Audience member

I have like 30 hours of an album from a week and I just don’t know... It’s too much.

Richie Hawtin

I think that things should need as little editing as possible. You don’t want to fuck with that human feeling. That is why I like doing it that way. There is so much computer technology involved in what we are doing that you have to find that right balance of man and machine, in the way that all of my things aren’t really synced. I like that for me, and much in the way that the newest Plastikman album is more of an Ableton album, but it was basically captured live when I played it at the Guggenheim [Museum, New York City].

I had to think of it a little bit more than what I would have done in the old studio days when it was all machines. I tried to then set something up so I could just jam it and play it. Then I think it was 68 minutes and threw one song away and brought it down to about 54. It was probably about ten to 12 edits in the hour, to make it feel still live. It shouldn’t sound like there’s editing. Also, back then, we weren’t using computers. It was all tape editing, which was really fun because you had all of these pieces taped up around on the wall, taped up, and you had to remember which was which.

Audience member

Besides the MP3, CD, and vinyl transition, how difficult was it for you to get along with DJs who are strictly into beat-matching? There are DJs who do not consider another guy a DJ if he is not doing the cueing and specifically the beat-matching. When you went all digital, using that technology, you managed to get rid of that part of the DJing tool. How could you get along with the DJs who weren’t into that? I think in the early 2000s everyone was so critical if it, because they were like two different things.

Richie Hawtin

For sure. I didn’t actually move to [working] fully in the box and away from control vinyl for probably another four or five years after Final Scratch and everything came out. One of the big things for me was when they went to four decks, so that I could start to find a different type of creativity. I don’t actually think general beat-matching is very creative, to be honest. I think it is just a skill. Some people are definitely pushing and pulling and then you get into scratching and that’s a totally different thing, an incredible thing. I was worried about what people were going to say and how it was going to feel. The actual thing that pushed me over the edge was really the technology not being stable enough. With very early versions of Serato and Traktor, you would plug everything in and it wouldn’t calibrate and things like this.

A lot of the time, I do a lot of my new thinking and development of how I am going to play in January, February, and March, because it’s the time I take off every year. I can play with everything. I can slowly ramp up and be prepared for when my gigs start, usually March or April. Whatever year this was, 2005, 2006, my last gig of the year was in Venezuela. I think I played three times in my life in Venezuela, in Caracas. All of these people were there waiting for me to play, everybody was super excited, and my fucking shit wouldn’t calibrate. I was like, OK, what do I do, just blame it on the technology, have a beer and say “Sorry, see you next time”? I was like, OK. I will sync this shit, get it into the computer, and do the set.

People were happy that I was there. They didn’t know what was going on. In a way, a lot of people didn’t care exactly what technology was being used. I was playing the music that I liked, somehow sort of in my style, it was a bit shaky because it was the first time I did it. And yeah, I never went back. Now I know I can... well, there is also problems with this technology, like you can have problems with the scratch. But that inspired me to just go back home and start playing with this stuff and try to develop where I could go next with DJing. I definitely played differently. We didn’t really add to that point – sometimes you can get into too many knobs and get too much into it. Sometimes I listen to a set and I’m like, oh, I was fiddling around too much, you know? My brother and my girlfriend call it noodling. Sometimes I’m noodling too much. You have to find that balance.

But since that time, there have always been people blasting me for making this choice. I want to be challenged and inspired continually. I choose to do it this way and continue to be energized and perform. My choices aren’t right for everybody but I feel that I do something unique. I am just going to keep following that pathway and see where it takes me. In the early days, I would have never thought I would have left turntables. I had spent 15, 20 years on turntables, and then you’re like, throw it away and start again. Even if it is beat-matching for you, there are still a lot of things that you can do. That is the great thing about all of this stuff. All of this technology. You never know where it is going to take you.

There was one other part of the question. Most of the comments now, from at least my generation of DJs and colleagues, are just kind of taking the piss. I was playing New Year’s Eve, two years ago, with my very good friend Sven Väth, who is an adamant, hardcore vinyl lover. When I am in the same booth with him, he always rolls his eyes when he sees my computer. He is waiting for something to go wrong probably. I had a complete meltdown on my computer on New Year’s Eve when I was playing after Sven. He was supposed to fly off somewhere else. He was so pissed. He was also like, “Told you, come back to the dark side.” Or whatever side he is. It is all fun and games. Sven is a good example. He has followed his path and his dream. He selects music in a completely different way than me. He plays some records that sometimes I am like, “How could he play this record?” I am sure he does the same with me. He uses the same mixer but in a completely different way, but he is following his path, his dream. He has his authenticity. He has his style. That is why he is Sven Väth. He is a crazy motherfucker. He is dedicated to that way. I am dedicated to this way.

Torsten Schmidt

We have one more in the back and I guess we continue tomorrow.

Audience member

This is a simple question. You have so many different activities. How much time do you find to make music?

Richie Hawtin

Not enough time, for sure. Good question. Especially as we are sitting in Japan, the land where people follow one craft and perfect that over a lifetime, which I very much respect and admire. To find the balance between all of the different projects is very complicated. I definitely don’t have enough time to make music, but it would be very hard for me to drop any or all of the other projects because they all have some kind of weird, at least in my mind, synchronicity and connection to each other. I love all of these things going on. I think if you love what you do and you are inspired, that energy really gets transferred. That also comes into how I am playing and things like that. And especially being involved you know, I was also involved in Beatport in the early days. I tried to keep as many of the projects somehow connected to the music, or how I am going to play. I am working on a project right now, which is a hardware project, which I hope will inspire new DJs. I love being a part of all that, you know?

So there will probably only be more projects, not less. One of the greatest things that happened to me last year was that I squeezed a month off in between some days. I was in the studio, I did the Plastikman album. I would love to find more time to do that. What I think that taught me is that I struggle to find the time to make music in the way that I used to make music. That just wasn’t realistic. In the early days I had all of my machines and boxes and it was in one location. I could just go downstairs and spend 48 hours or three weeks on music. That is just not possible right now.

The last album was created, basically, in the box. Which took me a long time to climb into, you know? It was really a nightmare for me to make music just on a computer. It was really uninspiring. In the early days I was so against looking at the arrangement window. Somehow I found a way and I would love to explore that more. I think now that is more possible, because I can actually sit in front of my computer now in a hotel room and at least work on something. I do have time off, but I am not always by my old studio. So now that I have unshackled the chains of needing to be in that physical, “mixer in front of me, 909 here and 303 there, and Dave Smith Instruments there,” I can continue to work wherever.

[Lecture resumes]

Torsten Schmidt

Before we get to that, and seeing that we are in a place where the language is actually alien to most of us, and I guess you must run into that sort of situation a lot of times, where you are relying on translators and you have no idea whether that person you’re talking to is actually rude or not, or whether the translator is probably not up to the standard that you want, or where there’s a lot of classic “lost in translation” moments. How do you navigate them?

Richie Hawtin

I don’t think that happens very often outside of Japan or China. Most of the other places English seems to be pretty well-spoken and understood. Definitely Japan and China offer challenges to connect and understand what’s going on, but I think this electronic community, we’re all kind of bound together by our love of music, and that more often than not brings together very, very good people that I’ve always found you can trust pretty quickly, especially when it’s less about lots of business contracts or lots of money. It’s more the club, the entertainment, the night out, the dinner before.

Over the years, most of the people I’ve met on those first trips to faraway countries have become longtime friends, who really sometimes are my voice in those countries. There’s about 12... I came to Japan 20 years ago for the first time and for the first five years I had my friend, Kenji, translating. Shortly after that, about 15 years ago, I met my friend Yuki Ito, who works for Womb club, he’s over there. [Pointing at him] You should translate this back into Japanese! And over playing, gigging, traveling the country together, sharing a lot of great meals and a lot of incredible Japanese sake, we became really good friends and got to know each other, and of have been on a trip to learn, in a way both together, more about each other and Japanese culture. We’ve got sidetracked onto this discovery of Japanese sake, which we kind of started together and not only have I learned a lot more about the culture through Yuki’s interpretations and through Yuki’s eyes, but I believe that Yuki has found out some things about his own culture by experiencing them through my eyes.

So yes, translation and interpreters and going to faraway places can be incredibly challenging or leave you feeling somewhat alone, but I think if you’re ready to get in there and connect to the local culture, and you want that, then most of the time the local people see that and they’re super excited and also proud to take you on that trip. I’ve definitely found that more so than anywhere in Japan.

Torsten Schmidt

What do we do here today? I’m missing the cube in here. I thought we were going to do the cube?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, well, there is budgetary concerns.

Torsten Schmidt

What is the cube?

Richie Hawtin

I think I’m going to sidetrack off of that before we get into the cube, which is related to the Plastikman project. Maybe we will pick up where we left off yesterday and finish a little bit of the DJing stuff, because it is two different beasts: how I play and the equipment, and also how we perform and create a visualization for both the DJ show and the Plastikman live show.

So I showed you the setup yesterday, which you were right that I forgot my most important apparatus, my foot pedal, which has been with me since probably like ‘96, ‘97. At that time I was taking an Ensoniq DP/4 Effects Processor with me. Pretty much the reason, well a couple reasons I was using that was, one, it was my main effects processor for the Plastikman albums in my studio because of the delay effects which I really liked, and two, that it had a CV input on the back. I’m sure unless you’re drawing everything on Ableton with your mouse, it’s very important for me in all these things to capture the movements of the human and somehow make that come through the machines. We only have two arms so there is only so many knobs you can twiddle. Very early on in the studio I had this foot pedal and it was just another way of expressing myself and doing different effects. It really made sense to bring that DP/4 Ensoniq box with me on tour in the early days so when I was playing records I had another way to interface with the equipment.

I was also telling you guys yesterday about not syncing everything. Before I actually get on stage, or before I start, I usually start with something... [Triggers beat on Traktor] I guess it’s going to work. Then just start things manually and bring things into alignment. [Demonstrates calibration] Again, I would be doing this on my headphones before I started.

As I was saying yesterday for that they are completely in sync, but they’re not actually in alignment. You can actually just start it, and the clap may not be on the beat but you know that you’re going to get some kind of interesting syncopation. Usually I would start everything on beat and then kind of let things move and sometimes start and stop the thing, so suddenly the rhythm that you’re playing over top would go from one five to like, three, whatever. Just changing, what do you call it, kind of offsetting the groove. That, especially when you are playing live, it’s also a very quick way for me to stop and start something and then suddenly, especially when you are kicking and you track in, come up with a kind of an opposing rhythm that connects to the rhythm that I was just playing, just by doing that quick offsetting.

Torsten Schmidt

How important is the first audio that you sent to the people? Do you do much of an intro, or?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, so I always do... Well we talked about this yesterday also. It’s depending on… you’re in a different place, you’re in a different mood, you’re with different people every night or every time you play. I like to have as many possibilities in the record crate to go with a certain feeling. Generally, yeah, there has to be some type of intro that’s not always completely ambient.

A lot of times when I’m playing with other DJs or live shows I’ll lock into the same kind of tempo and we’ll do some type of smooth transition. Maybe even playing this over the last DJ for the last couple of minutes, as long as I ask him first, so that there’s some kind of bridge and smoothness to the transition so that you don’t… I don’t really want to jar people too much. If someone is on the dancefloor with their eyes closed and they’re really into the rhythm and totally lost in the music then somehow I want them to follow this journey, not open their eyes, but realize there has been a transition. Someone new is coming on but still be lost in that moment. There has to be a smoothness and you have to think about that. So I would normally start with something and… [Demonstrates]

Something like that. Again, what I’m using is adding the drums on top of something ambient, bringing the percussion in from the song, adding claves and other... Somehow I like drums that are kind of musical, so toms and things that you can detune. Then starting to offset the rhythm, because I really like it when people are dancing, my favorite time is if you kind of get them to find strange grooves which are nearly on the edge of losing the groove, so you nearly trip over yourself and, like we said yesterday, it’s also why I like very minimalistic music. I like just adding these little notes around and letting the delays and the interplays between the delays and the reverbs really open up space that people can climb into and dance around with their feet and also in their mind.

Torsten Schmidt

How important is that tantric tension in there? Will you just keep it going? You’re on the verge of dropping wherever and then...

Richie Hawtin

Tension is what I’m really into. There’s a lot of tension in my sets. This is also why I love this machine, this Push machine. It’s very easy to grab and enter notes. I can push them in with my fingers. I can kind of do a repeat. I can also then suddenly copy then paste that. I can do a lot of detuning. I can have rhythms going on for over three tracks, and that one is the thing that is kind of the repeating phrase. Hopefully people actually feel that it’s one long ten-minute song that has different parts. Then maybe you come back to that again later. Sometimes I’ll have one loop going as a bed loop that I start within the first five minutes of my set, and that could be going for half an hour. Every time I try to take it away I kind of lose this whole foundation of what that set’s about. That’s interesting because you’re bringing all these other things on top but that one loop may be the kind of defining rhythm that drives through that whole set, and that really can’t be duplicated because those rhythms of the other things that you’re putting on top are just creating something that nobody else could create, and probably something that I could not recreate. Because I don’t save anything. First thing I do when I start, before offsetting things, I clear Push.

Sometimes I start and end the same because I have certain things that I really like and it kind of brings me into the moment. But once I’m going, I don’t really know where it’s going to go. Also, with Traktor, you can load preset loops in songs and all that kind of stuff. One, I don’t do that because I actually don’t have time to go through and noodle on setting everything up. More likely, is that if they were set, there would just be more circumstances that I would fall into the same kind of pattern. I really don’t like that to happen.

Torsten Scmid

Also, the nature of your sets, just from the length alone, they are very different than, let’s say, a 45-60 minute set where you just highlight certain pieces of a song. It’s more about, I guess, the general arch and dramatics that you want to narrate.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, I do shorter sets than I ever used to. You know, sometimes one-and-a-half hours. Mostly the standard is two hours for a lot of the shows right now. That’s good when you’re trying to do a lot of gigs in a row or keep a momentum. I think, you know, I can do good hour-and-a-half to two-hour set, but they are a different beast than if I’m doing a three or four or five-hour set because then there is longer to develop. You can kind of play with people longer. It’s important also for you, as an artist or performer, to have more time to discover things with the people.

There’s a danger in everything becoming 45 minutes or one hour or even one-and-a-half or two hours. If I was only playing one-and-a-half, two-hour sets the whole time, I think after a while those sets would suffer, because it’s when I play those other longer sets where I get a bit looser. It’s like I was saying yesterday, I used to enjoy playing and getting to that six-hour mark or five-hour mark in the mornings of Detroit. It wasn’t only that I was looser but, all the people on the dancefloor were looser. They were like, “OK, we’ve heard 4/4.” I would go down and play sometimes kind of hip hop, still a 4/4 but kind of more downtempo. Slow the tempo to 110 or 108, similar to some of the other Plastikman records, or speed it up, play some kind of early drum and bass record. As long as it had space and there was rhythm, it was always an incredible place to get to. You need that. I don’t practise at home so I need to get to that moment where I’m feeling free to just experiment more than I would after 45 minutes.

Richie Hawtin

Do you feel an obligation to play differently to, let’s say, when the DJ was some sort of a community service that was assigned to the in-house music nerd, like “Hey, we need someone who knows about this shit and just plays the records”? Now, we’re in a situation where people have traveled and they’ve paid a pretty steep ticket price to come and see you, while the guy that lives there and is the community service leader all around might be able to do similar things.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of people doing similar things. There’s a lot of anticipation. Ticket prices are high. It’s not a perfect rule, but I’m trying to have kind of a one city rule where I only play in each city once per year. There’s places where I’d love to come back to and I wish I could play more but, every time I play the second time in London or the third time in London, that’s basically in my mind, especially when a lot of people are only going out Thursday, Friday, Saturday for a big night, I’m taking two cities away from people. To find a good balance of that and play in the right places, I think people know that I don’t come around so often and I want to give them the best possible performance.

In that way, I try to, you know... We used to do double gigs on nights and lots of gigs in a row. Somewhere, you start to lose the quality. I know I’m better when I’m somehow rested and not totally stressed for a gig, you know? You have to take all this into the idea.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you deal with that in general? Obviously, it’s pretty tempting to go to all these marvelous places and try to fit in as many of them as possible. But, at the same time, you are a human being and no matter what we thought a while ago, we do need rest sometime. Everyone that’s coming to see you, for them, it’s the big night out. They couldn’t care less if you’ve already had four of those nights that week. How do you make sure that you are loose enough so they get the best of the night but, at the same time, professional enough so you can make sure and deliver that?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. There’s no quick answer to that, I think. Knowing your limitations and thinking about that in the planning stages. Honestly, over the summer, we had a really amazing summer. Every Thursday I’m doing a big party in Ibiza, where I like to be there, it’s my event. We open doors at 9 PM. I like to be there pretty much when the doors open. I don’t play until 3 or 4 AM. Then I usually play until 8 or 9 AM. It’s usually a 12 hour schedule. Then we go Friday, Saturday, Sunday into gigs. So to find the right balance to be able to do all that is quite challenging.

I think what we found out this year was, I would say, we were 95% on point for how we scheduled everything, and that was planned six months before. Then, in the summer, a couple of other cool offers came up, kind of one-time gigs. We did something with Raf Simons, the fashion designer, and a friend was doing another party and we were like, “OK, yeah, let’s do it.” Just those little things that changed this masterplan that we had made a dramatic difference, and kind of a negative difference. Around that time, after those gigs, you know, myself and my team, we were all just like, pfff. You don’t want to have this feeling when you’re going into a gig of, “I wish I had a night off right now.” We’re all professionals, we can pretty much do some smoke and mirror shit and people are not going to feel that we’re tired and we’re going to do a great show. But it does affect the show.

For a small DJ gig, we were talking about DJ show, DJ-plus show and DJ festival show yesterday. For a small DJ gig, it’s pretty easy to just go and rock it. Maybe one or two extra tequilas to knock you back into shape and wake you up and you do it. But when we have a bigger show, and Itaru is there and he’s not touring as much as me, he’s ready to go. We have Matthias [Vollrath], my lighting guy there, and the whole team travels, whether it’s one hour or 12 hours. Then, all these people are coming and you want to, out of respect, out of everything that we stand for, we want to do a really great, great show.

But there’s something that really actually helped me with that. A couple of years ago I read this incredible book from Andre Agassi. It starts off with him in the shower before his last US Open. He’s under the shower for, like, two hours trying to prepare himself. He’s like, “I can’t do this. I’m not going to be at my best.” I don’t know if this sounds right or not, but his point was, even if you go out there and do 80% or 90%, don’t kill yourself to do 100%. If you know what you’re doing and you spent all this time, then just lose yourself into it. Play the best at that moment and that’s going to probably be more than what the people are expecting or what they hoped.

I think after 20, 25 years of doing this I feel a confidence on that setup. I always come back to that moment. Just go out there, you know what you’re doing. Go for it. Even if you walk away at the end, because I used to beat myself up a bit, “Shit, it wasn’t as good. I was only here one time this year. I was only at 80%. That one mix, I had the chance to knock it out of the park.” Probably, I did knock it out of the park, just not as high as I wanted to. I have to keep the expectations for myself at a certain level. That helps too.

Torsten Schmidt

Also, this was coming from someone who was, as a kid, in one of the roughest tennis courts ever and definitely had put the practice and the hours in. I guess it is worth it to have all these hours in early enough and do your routines and your practice.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. Practice makes perfect, right? Until you can play and perform with your eyes closed and just stop thinking, that’s the point you want to get to. I want to get to. However long the set is, if time starts to fly by and I’m completely lost in a moment for three minutes or three hours and I’m not thinking about the [Traktor] X1 or the Push and I’m just interfacing myself, then that fluidity of my movements and my choices and decisions at that moment all start to come completely in sync. And as I become in sync, I feel that’s the moment you can become also in sync with the crowd and what they’re doing and thinking and dancing, and hopefully their thoughts.

It’s like if you go to a massage, a meditation, or if you do yoga, it’s like, OK, let the thoughts start going by and sometimes you can’t. Something keeps coming up. But if you can get rid of those, then you can meditate. If you get rid of those, you can enjoy your yoga session. If you can get rid of all that stuff, that’s when all of us can have a moment together on the dancefloor that can last, you know, who knows how long?

Torsten Schmidt

That meditation, I guess, will help you again if you are later on in self-doubt again about, “Did I knock it out of the park? Did I knock it into the ranks, or into the family section or out of the stadium?” No matter how many people come to congratulate you, in the end, you are the only level to gauge whether that night was worth it for you or not, right?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. For sure, I’m happy when everybody else is happy. Even if I’m a little disappointed. You’ve got to answer to yourself in the end. I think, in your performances, in your sets, whatever you’re releasing, your business decisions, your career decisions, have the right people around you, stay in control from beginning to end. Work with people who can help support you. But only you can represent yourself. That’s why you really have to follow your heart, follow your gut. If something starts to feel like it’s going the wrong way, change it. Don’t be afraid to do that.

There’s more of a rule book for electronic music now than ever before. In the early days, we didn’t really have anything, we just followed and watched people. Don’t be afraid to make your own decision. What’s good for your colleague or your friend or your studio partner upstairs may not be good for you. Learn to notice that and do your own thing.

Torsten Schmidt

Have you ever met a critic that you actually take seriously that is harder on you than yourself?

Richie Hawtin

My mum. Isn’t everyone’s mum like a good critic, bringing you back down to earth? My mum does that.

Torsten Schmidt

What’s the best advice she gives you?

Richie Hawtin

I don’t know. Somehow, “Don’t be too egoistic,” and, “Let the air out of your head.” I’m always having a lot of ideas and you’re dreaming of new ways of working and doing things, and that can also go in another way and start to bring you up into a dream world that’s not reality. It’s harder now than it used to be because there’s just so many opportunities. The whole scene is huge. There’s different offers coming over the table, you’re playing in front of 20,000 people, people screaming and all this, and totally into what you’re doing. Deflating the cloud that you’re on and just coming back down, again, that’s why you need a good support team and network. My team, sometimes when it’s a good show, they’re the first to high five me after, or they’re also the first to criticize me, or sometimes they just don’t say anything and I was like, “I know what you’re saying.”

Torsten Schmidt

Do you think it helped you that you were not the only creative son your mother had?

Richie Hawtin

I don’t know if it was good for my mum because I think we drove her crazy. My brother’s a painter, so he’s doing visual art. I think it definitely helped each other [to] cross-inspire each other. My brother was actually the first one to listen to Jeff Mills on the Detroit radio. I was kind of going back and forth past his bedroom and, “What’s that crazy shit you’re listening to?” It was after a couple of weeks or months that it was like, “OK, it sounds really cool.” Then I kind of got into it, and then, you know. His art is also very minimalistic.

Some of the painters that I’m a big fan of now were introduced to me by my brother, and it still happens now. He goes to see a show or he’s downloaded a new album. He’s on a lot of these, what’s it called? It’s not Kickstarter, but some of the websites that are really just new artists. You can download everything for free, but you can donate. There’s one main one, and he’s always searching for ambient music and something. He’s like, “OK, this is cool for your intro.” It’s a very cool relationship.

Torsten Schmidt

On the visual side, when we go back to the intro bit, what is Itaru-san doing at that moment?

Richie Hawtin

Well, Itaru-san is doing exactly whatever he wants at that moment, and I’m in a trusting relationship that we’re somehow connected even when he’s at front of house. Sometimes we have little chat windows. We use Skype or iChat to back-and-forth. “OK, I’m thinking of this,” or, “It’s going to be a little bit like two days ago,” or, “Here comes a break, let’s go completely black.” There’s a little tiny communication sometimes, but a lot of it is just the trust and the feeling that he has by listening to me, and that I’m trying to... He has to kind of respond.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you technically interface outside of the chat window? Are you doing real life interpretation what you’re hearing, or are you using software elements to do that?

Itaru Yasuda

[To Richie] Actually, I can’t remember when we [have] chatted on my computer, because I’m using Windows because of my software. It’s all about improvising when we perform a Richie Hawtin DJ gig. People always ask me, “Do you get media signal or sound?” But in the end, I don’t get anything. I just have one controller and one laptop, that’s it. I’m just following by my hand.

Torsten Schmidt

Can we get a little bit of a demonstration before we explain that so that people get a better idea? [Itaru demonstrates on screen]

Richie Hawtin

We’re lucky to have both projects going with Hawtin shows and Plastikman. Plastikman definitely has a lot of MIDI and information going back and forth, so it’s very tightly synced, but since the DJ show is changing every night it has to be as un-synced as possible, and it really is just by a feeling and an interpretation. Of course we sit down and Itaru’s working on his visual elements all the time, and we make some decisions before the show or before the tour about what we like, and then his show visually develops over the tour, or over the year, as mine continues to develop with putting new music inside.

Itaru Yasuda

There’s no way [to know] what Rich plays next. Maybe he also don’t know what song he should play next. I usually don’t use any movie file. All my content is real-time generated stuff. Everything is programmed like this. Everything is inside some component and I can select. Each composition has only eight parameters, but this eight parameter item follows his music. It’s dynamic music. Also I have some presets, so I can change the things instantly when he do something like [sings], then I can also change the state instantly.

Torsten Schmidt

You’re playing along with your knobs in the same way as what you’re hearing there?

Itaru Yasuda

Yeah. [Demonstration]

Richie Hawtin

Something kind of like that I guess. Hope that gives a little bit of an idea. [Applause]

Torsten Schmidt

The three main windows over there, would that be three different screens that you would play to in a live setting, or is this as one, like the cueing thing? How does it work?

Itaru Yasuda

The center part is what you’d get behind Rich usually. The side screen is my monitor. I have only two channels on there, mixing one to the other.

Torsten Schmidt

In a bigger setup where you have different screens, if you wanted to play to those three different screens, you would need to have nine of those windows in total?

Itaru Yasuda

Usually we don’t play with multiple windows, but sometimes some festival want to have like five or six. It’s always different, that’s why I always get to the venue one day before Rich. I go to the venue and set up everything, every time [there’s a] different type of LED screen, different resolution, but I try to keep the good quality always.

Richie Hawtin

Sometimes it’s like we would also, instead of having multiple screens of the same thing, Itaru would scale up one image over those, so it may actually abstract the image, but he would make a decision if that works. Everybody, most of the festivals and places we’re going, if we’re not giving them our own rider – which we do have, which says exactly what we want the stage to look like – we have to plug into their stuff. A lot of time they have more than what we would normally need. What you will see quite often is maybe the artist before or after [us] using three or four different screens and side ones and lots of lights, and we come in and we just try to focus all that attention onto the stage, and also give breathing room for the music and the visuals, because once you start putting those together they can become very powerful, but they can also become confusing, so this also goes into the design and the prep work of what the visuals are going to look like, my style of that time, if it’s a little bit more house-y or techno, and then what type of show we’re doing.

Torsten Schmidt

Aesthetically where do you take your visual cues from. It has come a bit of ways since the trademark K7 Tube Flight.

Itaru Yasuda

I think it’s a good question, but even before I thought that the work was Rich. I was like big fan of him when he came to Tokyo. I adjust it. So I know what kind of visual would fit to his music, and also there is maybe some of you might know Ali Demirel, he’s been working with Rich more than ten years I think. I also really love his work. He is actually our creative director now, so sometimes he gives me some ideas, but also I try to make something different. Most of the time as you can see I play some really, really simple stuff, but maybe when Rich plays some crazy beat at end of the show I kind of also do something really strange. [Demonstrates]

Richie Hawtin

Itaru and I never do a show together which is just music and visuals, there’s always the lighting element too, which our friend Matthias does. That also is made in the same way. Matthias is making lighting cues and deciding on what fixtures to use, and that goes with our stage design. All these elements have to come together, fuse together, and not be overpowering all together, but also be able to operate separately. A lot of the time it’s the music, then the visuals are following, and the lights are following after that, so if I’m playing something ultra minimal and there’s sounds like little bouncing balls and little delay lines then you may see some small balls on the screen, and then maybe the lights are all circular or going around the edge of the screen. There has to be composition and an aesthetic.

This is what, and especially Ali and I, have been trying to do since about 2004, because at that moment LED screens started to come on the market, they were cheaper, many festivals were having this. You would get to the festival and they would just be plugging in a video camera, or just the most atrocious images that you can imagine. It was at that point I was just like, “OK, if this is the way the scene is going and 50% of my gigs are going to have a screen behind me, then we need to make that content.”

As soon as we made that decision it was like, well, now we have this beautiful content that’s playing behind me, but the lighting sucks. Then it was, “OK, we have to bring a good designer in.” And it didn’t happen overnight. It’s really been, like, ten years of doing that. It took probably at least two years for Matthias or Ali in the early days to be able to follow me and what I was doing, and also for me to have the confidence of knowing [they could follow]. In some of the early days I had a screen so I could see what was happening, and I would respond by that. Now I can kind of feel what’s going on behind me. It’s kind of starting musically, but sometimes that’s going and it’s inspiring these guys, and Matthias is doing something with the lights and that kind of re-inspires what I am doing musically. It’s a live, spontaneous relationship.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you factor in that sound and vision travel at different speeds? He’s reacting to your audio while... so that reaction will be with the crowd later than what they’re actually hearing as well.

Richie Hawtin

In a way, when you try to start to sync a lot of things exactly to audio cues you have more problems with it than of these different perceptions in time of audio and visual, but when it comes to the way Itaru, Ali, and I are working, because they’re actually out there, they’re responding to the audio in real time and they’re in the same place as the crowd. There the ones kind of bringing that back interface.

Torsten Schmidt

How would that now differ from the other setup that already, before people knew what it was like, puts in a few questions into the minds of the crowd just by its physical presence.

Richie Hawtin

You lost me on that one. With Plastikman?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah.

Richie Hawtin

Back to the cube. That works in a completely different... That show, of course is, Plastikman is a live show that is only my material. For that we had to make some different considerations. We knew there were a certain amount of songs that we wanted to do. We really wanted to make a show that was more synchronous and connected.

This is completely… I think this computer with all my DJ stuff in is pretty unorganized. The Plastikman show is all laid out, and we have some rules in how we can play with that. You can only play these ten songs. We’ve actually, at this point, we have to play those songs in this order, but between the beginning and the end of each song we can kind of play and have a system that as I’m changing different MIDI notes that’s the actual same notes that you’re hearing and also triggering images on the screen. It’s kind of an in-between of being a live show and being a DJ show. I have some flexibility once I’m playing a song, but I know that song two comes after one, and song three comes after two, and so it’s a bit more methodical.

Torsten Schmidt

What’s the best way to highlight that, or show case it? How many of you guys are Ableton users out there? [Looks at audience] OK cool, now it’s speaking your language more. I have a lot of these, a lot of the things grouped in here, but you can still see it’s a pretty big session.

Basically what you can see here is each one of these, that’s song one which goes down to song two, song three, song four, and so forth. [Scrolls down screen] What I chose to do, everything runs live, there’s no audio, as in audio waveforms or files. There’s some samples for drums. In essence the audio is being generated live, and the visuals are also being generated live. It’s this MIDI information that we need to be able to sync up in the visualization. If it was all audio files it would be what you see very often in some of the other live shows that have very good visual shows where basically all the decisions have already been made, and they’re basically playing back video that’s just a video file. We didn’t want to do that. I couldn’t get up on stage and press start and know that the next 60 minutes is all laid out in front of me and I was just basically doing a fist-pumping thing. I wanted to have as much flexibility as possible.

Torsten Schmidt

How much of a pain was it to recreate the actual music then?

Richie Hawtin

With this file and the new shows it wasn’t actually a pain, because this was based upon what became a new album, so this was much easier than doing the first Plastikman show which was reinterpretations of the old songs. For that show we had to create new plugins, and new technology, and recreate everything from the ground up. This time I basically made the album within the Ableton Live file so that as I started creating lines, the pipelines to communicate to the visual machines were already in there. It was an easier thing to do, but there was a lot of architecture that we had to figure out.

We had this special plugin here, but for TouchDesigner, so what this is doing is taking all the MIDI information of my session over there and converting it to OSC and sending it over Ethernet to a Itaru’s computer, so we have all these different knobs which can be assigned to both a musical plugin on my side but also be assigned to a visual plugin over on his side. So when I open a filter on a 303, perhaps that changes the color parameter on the visual computer. Of course I have to make the songs, and I have to do the rhythms and all that, and Itaru has to make visualizations, but because this is all running live and it’s all MIDI information, it’s very easy to manipulate that as we go.

Because we have two projects going on it would be absolutely ridiculous if there were just Rich doing different songs with the same kind of visuals so we wanted to actually... I wanted to do two totally different things. Rich, the DJ, is on stage with visuals behind him, and in that kind of context. There’s also a dancefloor thing, where I’m trying to get people to move. With Plastikman, what we’re doing right now is I’m only interested in playing in strange locations or positions, preferably not at festivals. This was at Sónar because they’re good friends of mine, but in art galleries. We did the Guggenheim last year, and I try to place myself within the crowd so I’m actually responding to the objects. It’s a bit of a David and Goliath idea, but I’m kind of within the audience having the same kind of experience. [Looking at photo from performance] You can see the scale, that’s me right there by the mouse, and that’s the… I usually end up doing projects or responding to people if I get bored or if I feel unchallenged. LED panels are coming down cheaper and cheaper, but it’s always just like this square thing behind you on a festival.

Now, OK, we’re doing some circular ones, but there’s only so far you can [go] when you’re stuck on stage. So the Plastikman shows right now, which we call Object, is wherever we’re playing we’re going to the location. I flew to New York to the Guggenheim, and we’re walking around it, usually with Ali Demeril and thinking, OK, what would be cool here? What kind of object can we build that is going to be a different interaction between me and the people and the music than you would normally expect? That’s kind of where this thing came from. [Pointing to photo] That’s the Guggenheim show, that’s the first version of this kind of monolith – it was a different size, which worked within that room. Then the song I won was a larger one, but I would foresee any new shows coming up to be completely new objects, depending on where they’re at. I can show you a little bit now, re-explaining, let’s show a little bit of Exhale, which was the last one.

Torsten Schmidt

With you saying “monolithic”, I mean obviously it gets pretty Caesarean pretty quickly, like, “Oh, here is my massive object. Here are my pyramids.”

Richie Hawtin

For the Sónar show there was no building that kept us in. There was a certain amount of people coming, so there was a push to have a large object that five or 6,000 people could enjoy. What was good was they’re enjoying from all sides, you don’t have the first ten rows have the best seat. You have even more people and people could walk around and get different perspectives. I find that interesting. It’s definitely not always bigger is better. We have something developing for a really incredible art gallery building, which is so massive that we could never build something to fight that building. The concept now would be to have small trees or small objects throughout and instead of having one big one, maybe having 20 or 30 or 40. Perhaps also with speakers in all of them, so it would be more of a subtle intimate show. You know, if we did that I would maybe even cut down on the amount of toys I need to play that performance, maybe make some more pre-decisions, and just even have something like eight knobs and faders or a Push or something that could go wireless so that I could kind of travel through the forest and play in the forest at the forest, with the forest while other people are going through.

Plastikman is a bit… again, it would be silly to just have two boom-boom-boom, shows. I think I’m really good at making people dance from my DJ side, so the Plastikman side could be a bit more open and experimental, which is, you know, I think I said yesterday, if I’m having fun and challenged and there’s a new project, and I’m inspired, I think that’s infectious for me and for the people. The perfect situation would be if someone’s at the event and they close their eyes they can kind of perhaps think in their mind something that would similar to our representation or if they close their ears and couldn’t hear the sound, then they would feel some type of music connection. That’s the challenge of what we’re doing with Plastikman. It’s something you can’t do with DJing, because what I love about DJing is the spontaneity – I love that I’m putting in a hundred new records in there tonight and as we’re all listening to it together, nobody really knows where it’s going to go.

It’s a big surprise to me as much as it is to you guys, but with Plastikman, we have these decisions we have to make six months ahead. We’ve got the songs, Itaru has to be like, “OK, I think circles and purples and greens make sense,” and he starts to work on his ideas and then we bring the computers together, and a lot of the time we get to a point where we’re building the show together. I’m kind of developing arrangements and I’m playing with how I’m going to change on these lines – perhaps the lead line I’m going to use some filter sweeps to make the line sound good. If that makes sense for it, then OK, Rich is going to play with the filter on this, what does that filter change look like on the screen? Once all that’s in place, it’s like a big system. Then you can play the system. But it takes a long time to make that system and all the pipelines work and be stable. You definitely don’t want to have any crashes.

The new Plastikman show is also – I can’t show you that now because we need to have an Ethernet Dante network, anyone know what Dante is? A Dante is, it’s cool, you should check it out, it’s basically audio over Ethernet so at the live show we have my computer, two visual computers, one for backup, then we also have the digital mixing console and a digital recording device and they’re all just Ethernet together and I have 16 nodes and I can say, OK, send these nodes over here, I have to send four lines to Itaru because some of their show is actually listening to the audio and they can visual wave forms. It’s super flexible. Anyone who wants to do a multi-channel audio shows and things like that, check out Dante. Yeah, I think that kind of explains a little bit of the network in there. I think Itaru said he’s using TouchDesigner, which is made by a Canadian firm. From me looking over his shoulder, I think it’s very, very, very, very complicated, but-

Torsten Schmidt

It looks a lot like Logic Environments.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, but Logic Environments you can click on it and go into it once, but here it seems that every time you click on it, you go into another level that you never knew existed before. It’s incredibly powerful and sophisticated, especially for real time-work.

Torsten Schmidt

Obviously you would never say such a thing, but are there moments in the show where Itaru says things like, “Oh God no, he’s doing this thing again, how am I going to match that? I told you, don’t do this, cause I can’t follow up with it?”

Itaru Yasuda

I can’t say no. I just program it.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, actually for the Plastikman show, once Itaru has set the computer up and it’s all working, he won’t touch the computer or anything for the whole show, because everything is coming from my MIDI controllers and stuff like that. For the Hawtin show, yeah, there’s moments of synchronicity and there’s moments of like, pure perfection, and there’s moments where things start to kind of diverge, but that’s also… I think creating a DJ show is like a story, it’s like a tapestry, and those types of shows, whether they’re one hour or two hours or ten hours need to be like a story. There needs to be some moments of anticipation, there needs to be some moments of reflection, there needs to be moments that kind of bring you down that are heavy and also things that uplift you and are light. Leaving, putting our heads together and coming to the show with a whole bunch of audio, visual and lighting cues and ideas and then somehow, over time, creating a relationship between us all, so that we all are doing our own thing but kind of for a connected, for a greater good, you can really create a really powerful situation.

But it takes more than one person. It takes more than us three, it takes a team, it takes planning, and that’s where we get back into having ten or 12 people on staff and thinking about logistics, Like Itaru said, sometimes he’s there one or two days before a show. Sometimes we have two big shows on a Friday night and a Saturday night and we have extra friends who will go in advance so that when we finish a show on a Friday we fly direct to the Saturday show, but everything’s already been tested and checked and that’s when it is like rock and roll. You’ve got to dial it in and you’ve got to be on the tour bus going to the next thing and know that you have trusted friends at the next place making sure the show can go on.

Torsten Schmidt

And then Lufthansa decides to go on strike and then that’s that.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah, well you know, we also had that, but that was after a show a couple of weeks ago coming from Atlanta where we all scattered onto different airlines, but yeah, you are at the mercy of your airlines, but you also have to have a team that can jump on that.

Richie Hawtin

Are there any questions from you guys? This is the mic, do you want to have mine?

Audience member

I once saw the Plastikman show, I think it was like an early version, and I remember I downloaded the Plastikman app and at the beginning of the show you connected your to the Plastikman app to the wi-fi network. There were these parts where I was getting notifications for lightning, some words. How do you integrate those messages? But now I see you work with Ethernet right, how do you manage to get along with latency and stuff and all that?

Richie Hawtin

There’s always definitely latency issues. On this Plastikman show we don’t have anything with the iPhone app, but on that one we had my friend Brian traveling with us, whose only job was making sure the networks for the show were actually stable, making sure the Ethernet lines were laid between the front of house and the stage, and also deploying our own array of wireless hubs around the venue so that we could communicate.

What we’re talking about, for those who don’t know, we had an application called the Plastikman Sync, and so because basically the heart of the show is the Ableton computer, we can use that information in incredible ways. So we were not only sending MIDI information and timing information to the visual computer, but we were sending it to a kind of wireless server and that was sending out to everyone’s iPhones and it was giving you… Basically, if you see down over here [demonstrates on screen] you’ve got these kind of cue pointers which are different parts of the song, so we were sending that to the iPhone, it was telling you, hey, you’re in this song at this part, it was giving you BPM and tempo, bars and measures throughout the show and then for certain songs. You actually had your own visualization on the phone.

We had one song called “Syncnotic” and on the screens, on the stage, you had six squares of different color that were representative of six tom sounds, and so I would basically jam on that and create a cool tom line, then add a kick, and all that was synced with an associated color and that would also be sent to the iPhones and if you looked to your iPhones, you’d get the same color squares lighting up and that was playing with, like we are doing with Plastikman now. Now I’m not on the stage, now I’m in the crowd and as I’ve been pushed to become kind of the star on stage and the festivals got bigger, I kind of lost that connection sometimes to the crowds, so that’s why I like to do small shows. But then to do a project like this, you’re basically in everyone’s pocket, you’re connected to them, or you’re playing within the people. Every step of this changes the dynamics and the relationship between me and the people, or all of us, and we’re connecting through technology, and it’s all these things that interest me. It’s hard for me to work on any of these projects and think, OK, what record am I going to play, or what’s Plastikman going to sound like, because as soon as you start creating something in a computer, it’s so easy to interface that into different ideas and design and faculties. There’s a lot of power to harness in that kind of creative use of technology.

Audience member

If possible, I want to know if there’s been some shows when things went wrong. Because there’s so [much] stuff going on that I think that at some point something [has] gone wrong. How do you go along with it, since your show is so attached to technology?

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. This show is now pretty stable, but on the last Plastikman tour we [said] it was like flying a 747 without the manual for the first time, every time you play it. We had a flight checklist. There was like ten things I had to do in this order to make sure everything worked, because you couldn’t go through every parameter and check it. It was like this one plug in had to be opened. You had to move a fader and then leave it in the background and not close the window, or some of the OSC messages would get lost. [And] so on and so on.

Most of the time it worked, but we did have a couple of crashes that we had one time in Detroit. Of course, Detroit, my hometown… The whole LAN network went down from the front of house to the stage, basically, black screen, lights off. Done. My guys couldn’t do anything, because I was in control. Basically, they were standing in front of a lighting console that was dead. So for five minutes, the show continued with audio. We just hoped that people thought it was meant to be like that.

But we’re all on headsets and everything. Everyone’s talking to each other. That show I was behind the screen, so people couldn’t see exactly what was happening. The shit was hitting the fan. “OK. The network’s down. OK. Reboot this.” Once you reboot some of the networks, the IP address is changed, and so we had to reboot that in and get the LAN up.

It’s definitely like you are flying a 747 and you’ve got a whole bunch of people in it, and engine one and two just shut down, and you know you’re OK for flying on one. You’ve got two still left, but what the fuck. You figure that shit out.

Audience member

Thank you.

Richie Hawtin

But I like that. That’s part of the fascination of playing with technology and also coming up with hare-brained ideas that need something new to be developed, whether that’s as simple as a Max for Live plugin. Or I work with the company called Line that makes IOS applications. That company came out of something that we needed for the Plastikman Show.

Richie Hawtin

Richie, I got this question. I’ve never seen the Plastikman show. I’ve only seen the Richie Hawtin show, back in Lima. I remember you had, I saw this documentary that you had this machine built by your father that you used to use in the Plastikman show. How does that work? How does that machine exactly work? How do you translate that machine into this?

Richie Hawtin

First, we built two of those machines. One of them is somewhere in the world. I don’t know. I hope someone knows what they have and is using it, and it’s not at a pawn shop or in a garbage tip. That would suck. [To Itaru] Don’t worry about it.

When I was doing my Decks, EFX shows in ‘96 , ‘97 and starting to bring the drum machine and the EFX box, I wanted to have more control over the parameters of the EFX on the actual mixers. The first couple of things I did with my dad, we had… Before the Xone 92 mixer from Allen & Heath, they had one called the Xone 62 that had six channels on. At that time, I was still playing records, so I was basically playing two channels of turntables, one channel of 909 drum machine, and one channel of effects.

Audience member

[Inaudible]

Richie Hawtin

For the tour, I wanted to manipulate more things. The DB4 effects processor only had one knob and a whole bunch of pages. I had my foot pedal, but I could assign delay times and stuff to MIDI controllers. So we took the two channels, we opened the mixer and basically took out the audio stuff and just attached the faders and all the EQ to a MIDI controller, a little MIDI brain. From my knowledge, that was the first MIDI-enabled mixer. It’s kind of the predecessor to this. [Pointing at mixer in front of him]

I didn’t need this many controls, but I wanted to have something more at my fingertips to capture… It’s what it’s all about. Anybody can play some songs and anybody can sing some songs now. All of us touch and feel knobs and faders in different ways. Some people prefer faders over knobs. Some people like different buttons. The way you manipulate and touch those and turn them, that’s very linked to the human spirit and to you, and to you and to me. The more I can grab by emotions and movements and bring them into the digital world, the more I think it sounds like Richie Hawtin. Did I answer?

Audience member

I thought that the mixer has something to do with visuals, too? Translate audio to visuals? Because the Plastikman is really like an aesthetic...

Richie Hawtin

It may have been there was another one we made called Plastikman Control which is a wider one. That had 16 faders and 16 buttons, three rows of it. Basically, what that was, was a very basic version of what the Push is now, because that was in 2003. There were very little MIDI controllers with enough buttons and faders to control Ableton. That show was on Ableton. It just made sense to have something that was kind of laid out like Ableton, so that I could do that show. Creating those type of things and experimenting and learning what works and what doesn’t is another way to find a better connection to your machines.

Torsten Schmidt

One more.

Audience member

I have a super specific and also not really related question. I saw you at Pitch festival this year in Amsterdam, and I was wondering how bummed out you were that you had to play during the World Cup Show and how happy you were that we won eventually.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. Who is “we” again?

Audience member

That’s Holland, that’s us.

Richie Hawtin

Yeah. That’s one of those you’ll never know what’s going to happen. A little bit of a back story. There was other places I usually play in Holland, and friends of my who are doing Awakenings and other shows. We pissed a couple of friends off, we said, “OK. We’ll come back next year, but this year we’re going to do something different, we’re going to do Pitch.” This is all the negotiation that goes back and forth these days. “We really want you. If you come, you’re going to be the main techno guy. You’re going to do the last slot.” We’re like, “Wow. This sounds great. The festival looks good. Last slot, we’re going to come in and slam it. They are going to let us do our whole visual show.” Then 10 days before it’s like, “Fuck. It looks like Holland’s in the final, and they are going to start right when you play or like half an hour before.”

This six months of work all leading up, my whole team talking, preparing this great show, and now, we’re going against the football. So it was very depressing. There was negotiations up until right before the game started. Originally, the screen was in a different place. I think it was going to be basically next to the stage or something, and they were like, “You got to move it. No matter what happens, that’s going to fuck up the dancefloor if some people do want to dance.” We moved that. Then the organizers promised, “We’re going to turn off the audio when you start, and people can just watch it.” Then they came up to me, like, I’m on in five minutes, they said, “OK. We’re going to turn the audio off in a minute.” I was like, “Fuck that. I’m not going to be the one who turns the audio off of the game for 5,000 people in the final.” Let it go. I’m going to work with this. Let’s just do it.

I remember that night. We were all in good moods and were like, “That’s how it is. Let’s do a great show.” In the end, the game ended and the people came over. It was one of the best shows of the summer. It was incredible, the feeling and the people. In my mind, the festival is a little bit more alternative, so there was lots of cool music going on and very diverse, and I felt that, “OK, I’m here to do what I do. This is my version of techno. Let’s celebrate together.” It was a bomb. But it was really stressy coming up to that.

Audience member

Cool. Thanks.

Richie Hawtin

Any questions, as obtuse as you want, are fine by me.

Audience member

You mentioned that you are really into Grimes’ music. I was wondering if there’s any other non-techno artist that you really like right now, or in general.

Richie Hawtin

I’m sure. I’d probably have to look at my iTunes and look what I’ve been downloading. I am a bit engulfed in techno and electronic music considering there’s about 10 to 20,000 demos or promos that come in every month, plus demos on top of that, plus having some time to go away from music. I’m probably not as up-to-date as possible.

Audience member

Even not with current stuff. What would you say your… What’s some other music that has inspired you?

Richie Hawtin

I think I have different moments where I get into something and I really engulf myself in it. Some of the early freeform jazz, Miles Davis and all that stuff, reminded me of I think what I believe a great DJ should be like. Having some points of reference, or certain songs that they may play, and how they get between there and back and forth I think is really inspiring. I like a lot of solo piano. A lot of music, like there’s this one cello guy that I really like, I can’t remember his name right now, but it usually is like man and machine, it’s like him or her in one instrument. Let’s hear what a master of that would do. So there is some other music other there.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess it’s back to the studios and discussing the World Cup and its further implications, but not without giving the man a hand for sharing so openly for two consecutive days. Thank you very much. Thank you Itaru-san.