Artist of the Week: Richie Hawtin

Video: ENTER Preview. Full details about the season ahead here.

Undeniably one of the biggest and most important voices in techno since the nineties, Richie Hawtin has been pushing the sound tirelessly during the past three decades. Although born in the UK, Hawtin grew up in Windsor, Ontario and it would prove a crucial location for him to take his passion for electronic music, introduced by his father’s love of Kraftwerk, to the heights he has since scaled.

It was the city's close proximity to Detroit that ensured that the techno that was being made at the time had a crucial influence on Hawtin. He became one of the most important figures in the city’s second generation of producers and DJs, alongside the likes of Jeff Mills, Carl Craig and Underground Resistance, putting on parties in the city and it's surrounding areas and becoming a renonwned DJ and producer in the region.

Although he would experiment with a number of differing sounds within techno, Hawtin tended to focus mostly on the more minimal side of the genre, stripping back the sound to its rawest and starkest components. He started the Plus 8 record label with fellow Canadian John Acquavia and started producing under a number of pseudonyms, including F.U.S.E, Vapour Space, Plastikman, and Circuit Breaker.

Video: Plastikman 'Spastik'

He also became revered for the way in which he used technology, living up to the ideoloy that techno was about pushing things forward. At a point when digital DJing was a pipedream of the future, Hawtin released the mix album Decks, EFX & 909 in 1999. The album was heralded for the innovative way he used the equipment at his disposal, and remains a classic for those wanting to understand techno at its uncompromising best.

The genre 15 years ago was a completely different beast, hard rolling music played in clubs pretty much entirely consisting of men. Hawtin would play a pivotal role in the way the music welcomed a newer audience. As the Twenty First century kicked in, techno became a key component of an Ibizan crowd which was moving away from the house, trance and progressive house which had dominated previously, spearheaded by both Circo Loco at DC10 and Cocoon at Amnesia, Hawtin a crucial component of the latter.

European and South American DJs were playing a slowed down, sexier version of the stark minimalism Hawtin had pioneered alongside other Detroit luminaries such as Daniel Bell and Robert Hood. The second record label Hawtin started, M_Nus, became one of the most important imprints in pushing this sound forward, particularly with its new breed of artists such as Magda, Marc Houle and Mathew Jonson, all of whom would become stars in their own right.

Video: Mathew Jonson 'Decompression' (released on M_Nus in 2004)

Hawtin never stopped pushing the boundaries of what a DJ could do as well, particularly the new possibilities that opened up with technology advancements. Embracing everything from social media to the latest DJ technology, Hawtin pioneered Native Instruments’ Traktor software (he helped them launch an iPad app this year) and built in a live feed to his Twitter account to put out every record he plays during his DJ set. And then he set up his own event in Ibiza.

Video: Richie Hawtin live at the Boiler Room in Amsterdam 

ENTER opened in 2012 on Thursdays at Space, successfully allowing Hawtin to push his sound on a weekly basis as well as transforming El Salon into a Sake bar. This year they’re all set to return back with a bevvy of guests that includes Damian Lazarus, Jamie Jones, Disclosure, Maya Jane Coles and Marcel Dettmann.

We’ll leave you with perhaps our favourite Hawtin track from a huge back catalogue, this beautiful mixture of ambient electronica and pulsating techno recorded under his Vapour Space guise way back in 1993. You can catch him every Thursday at Space for Enter, as well as at Cocoon in the Park a week on Saturday (main ticket link)

Like this?

Read our interview with former Minus artist Marc Houle here.

Tickets are no longer available for this event