Das folgende Interview entstand vor Richie Hawtins Auftritt im Rahmen seiner großen Plastikman – Artifakts (BC) – Tour in der Frankfurter U-Bahn Station Miquel/Adiques Allee am 6.November 1998.
Zu hören gibt’s das Interview und natürlich viel Musik von und um Richie Hawtin am 27.Januar, um 17 Uhr bei Lock Groove auf dem Offenen Kanal (103,7 / 105.0).
Hinter-Net!: Radio in the Detroit area:
Richie Hawtin: Right now in Detroit it isn’t so good. About ten years ago radio was really really really good. Half of the reason I got into this music was that in 1987 there was a number of radio shows on every night of the week. Jeff Mills was doing a mixture five nights a week – Derrick May was on there sometimes, there was another guy called Dwaine in the Mix. So, tuning into the airwaves from Detroit, you could pick up all different types of new music. There was also a big DJ a lot of the Detroit guys talked about called the Electrifying Mojo. You know, a lot of us were exposed to new music that way. And that’s really one of the best ways of exposing people to new music: on the radio. You don’t have to go out and buy it; you can just experiment and go through and listen and see what you like. So, in Detroit now and in Windsor where I live — because they’re so close, all the signals go all over the place — there’s a couple of college and university stations that play some interesting things, but on the whole the radio is really gone backwards. It’s a lot of commercial hip hop, a lot of commercial alternative – nirvana you know – all that kind of stuff, and the only electronic music they will play is probably more … just commercial electronic music. Nothing really … I can’t remember the time I last heard a Derrick May record on the radio.
Hinter-Net!: Electrifying Mojo:
Richie Hawtin: He’s doing a radio show now. He took a lot … he took some time off, disappeared for a while. He’s back now, but he’s still … you know, in the mid-eighties he was playing cutting edge music — really really pushing the envelope. Now he’s still playing the same records. So it’s not so much … it’s not so interesting anymore.
Did Electrifying Mojo move on to be a poducer?
Richie Hawtin: No, no he was just always a radio jocker. Just loves music and tried to play new things that excited him and maybe music doesn’t excite him as much … – you know – I can’t talk specifically because I haven’t heard his show for a long time now, but from what I hear he’s not the force that he once was.
Is there a new generation of producers in Detroit?
Richie Hawtin: There’s a lot of new up and coming talent in detroit. The trouble is: there is a number of … you have the Underground Resistance posse and a couple of … you know Transmat, Metroplex: they have some new people on there. They’re nearly overshadowed by the big guys. It’s even on +8, we had some new people and I have a friend who’s still doing stuff on +8. He was recording under the name of Theorem. And he records now on his own label we set up through my label and it’s just called the Th-series. When it was on +8 there were so many other artists with myself, Speedy J, … he was nearly overshadowed and we were trying like … you know there is new talent in Detroit. But now he’s got his own thing, it’s starting to gain a bit more momentum; people are looking at it; there’s a handful of records coming out in the next couple of months by new kids; kids who … they are friends of mine or just people you’ve seen at parties the last couple of years, who start up pressing their own white labels and things. So, I think the next couple of years in Detroit are gonna be really really interesting. and it’s not gonna be from the people you suspect or the camps, from the organisations you’d expect. I think new things are gonna pop up and I think it’s really exciting.
How has the Detroit audience developed?
Richie Hawtin: The audience has gone through … definitely a couple of changes. When I first started deejaying in Detroit and hanging out… you know, 87, there was two or three clubs playing it. There was a club which was more of a mixed club, there was more of a black club, and there was more of a white club — just using typical categories here. But there was a real good crossover; good kinds of percentages of all types of people into it. Over the last five to eight years, if anything, the house and techno thing is kind of split. It’s been so much segregated in the states. There has been a movement of more of the black community getting more into the house and the white middle-class kids coming into the techno. I think partly to do with promotion, partly to do with just a change in the music. But I think hopefully that will somewhat come back together. Over the last eight years there’s been a lot of extremes in music too, so … when you have extremes it’s a very easy time for things to be segregated and split off, so …
Richie Hawtin at the Omen, Frankfurt:
Richie Hawtin: Yeah, the first time was I believe 1990 or 91 but it was for Sven’s (Sven Väth) birthday party and it was myself deejaying and two of the +8 acts. We didn’t get to play because it was so hot inside that the sequencers and the samplers couldn’t work. Speedy J was with us and he also played. That was one of the first times I ever played in Germany, really and I’ll always remember it, it was crazy. it was always crazy – in a good way. The omen was always a place where I could pretty much play whatever I wanted and I was always able to play humungous sets. A lot of other places still try to constrict the DJ to two hours and a lot of other countries are really into … they really segregate the music: you go to one club and it’s techno, you go to another one and it’s house. And if you try and play house music in a techno club people freak out … like in a bad way; they don’t want to hear it. It’s very close-minded and the Omen was always a very open-minded crowd. You could really play all different types of music; go all over the place over a course of an evening and as long as you were playing good music people were getting into it. So it wasn’t really … I never used to plan … I don’t plan my sets. I never used to plan what I was going to do at the Omen, but I just knew that whatever I felt, whatever I wanted to do, I could do it.
Richie Hawtin playing Germany:
Richie Hawtin: I played at Time Warp. … I played at Omni 3 on a new year’s eve in 1993 I think. Other than that it’s always been the Omen. It’s kind of sad that it’s closed; but it’s also interesting to play somewhere different. Maybe it won’t be as good. Maybe it’ll be the same, but it also has the potential to be better, because it is a totally new experience not only for me but also for the crowd listening.
Artifakts (BC) – originally to be called Klinik, why change of title?
Richie Hawtin: Well, in some ways it doesn’t go as well as it should have but the whole idea with the Klinik album and with all the Plastikman albums … there was always somewhat of a theme, an idea, an atmosphere that I was trying to create and things came together very fast when I recorded them. So over a matter of weeks or one or two months all the ideas and all the pieces would be finished and it would really gel together very well. But because when I was trying to record Klinik I had a number of interruptions and I went in and out of the studio and so really … you know there wasn’t really enough material for the album Klinik. There was – about two or three years down the line – but it’s wasn’t … it didn’t flow together as well as it should have. so that’s why I moved on, finished a different album (Consumed) and then I’ve come back and you know … what is left over is tracks that all were recorded for the idea of Klinik, but they all started to go in slightly different ways, so there wasn’t enough of the central idea. It’s similar ideas in kind of slight variations.
What does BC stand for?
Richie Hawtin: Before consumed
How do you chose titles?
Richie Hawtin: Well, yeah, some people just title things just for the hell of it and they don’t really look into it. It’s like some people just make music … you know just dance records. There is no other purpose. I think the way a record looks, the way it sounds, the way the title is spelt out the way … the font you use to spell that title. All these things are part of the – I guess – creative process. Of course the main thing is the music, but if you’re going to try and represent music to someone and they haven’t heard it, you want to visually somehow get the idea across; so whether it’s the way it looks or even the way what the words may mean to someone or even the way the words sound… that’s why I use a lot of Ks in my titles, because they are very hard. It’s … you know they don’t roll of your tongue easy. And that’s similar to how the tracks actually sound when you hear them in the end. All those things are very important.
It’s not just music. It’s a package. Not in a way that it’s a package that I am trying to sell or promote, but to me it’s not done until I’ve finished it all. Until it has a title, till I know how that title will look … you know on paper and until the track is finished and how it sounds.
Consumed – what does consuming refer to?
Richie Hawtin: I’m not consumer-orientated at all. I’m not consumer-orientated, no way. I very rarely consume … you know … crazy substances … well, very rarely in comparison to what I used to be like… I went through my phases of … – which I think quite a few people did – you know for a couple of months or maybe a year just going a little bit crazy … You could reference it to that, but really Consumed is very very far away from that: it’s being consumed by an idea, being consumed by the atmosphere which is represented on the album. I don’t think it’s an album which you can just lightly play one of the tracks or just kind of listen to and say „yeah that’s cool.“ You really need to give the album time – and to be consumed by the album and let as you are consumed by the album also let the album consume you and vice versa.
Jeff Mills’s new label Tomorrow is to include spoken word performances and poetry – also a spoken word element on Artifakts (BC) – a new trend in electronic music making?
Richie Hawtin: I don’t know. I do things which are electronic based. The reason I’m here is because I understand technology. That’s enabled me to do music to deejay and to do all different types of things. That track on Artifakts is actually a second version of a track which I did in 1993, which was on the F.U.S.E. album. I like the idea of playing with … I don’t like language or vocals in electronic music. It’s something that I’m trying to get away from. I like the idea that electronic music is free from that. It can really speak to each person differently and each person can look at it slightly different. Maybe they get an idea … feeling from it, but it doesn’t say exactly what it is about. But when you take that to the extreme and use technology to look at language and reword things and chop the actual English language or whatever language up you can start to play with it not as a language but as sounds and as a synthesis. And that kind of interests me, too. There’ll probably be more things like that. I’m actually working on a … I think I’m gonna start a project tomorrow, because I’m travelling for six weeks and start recording a lot of spoken word throughout the world where I’ll be travelling and use that for a new project for next year.
A transposition of language into music?
Richie Hawtin: Well, there’s also … as an artist you go through this all the time, especially non-spoken word interviews: when it’s transcribed to the written word into magazines or even languages: things get misunderstood. People put the answer to a different question, anything … you don’t really have any control over things like that. So that kind of interests me. I’ve had some good situations and a lot of bad situations with that. So it’d be interesting to turn the table on people who do that to artists and just turn the tables on general life. Take things in and out of context and see what can be done.
Transposition of Plastikman’s music in live acts?
Richie Hawtin: Well, it’s strange … like right now I haven’t done any 100% live performances since, I think, since 1995. The last couple were things in England: Tribal Gathering, Glastonbury. I did one in Munich at the Tribal Gathering there. Lately what I’ve been doing is … you know just doing a lot of deejaying but more of a hybrid DJ-set which hopefully will do tonight with drum machines and effects boxes and so what I’m trying to do there is … although I do play some of my own music, of course I’m playing a lot of other people’s music. But I try to bring other’s people’s music into a context of what I’m trying to do — by changing it around mixing it with other things and trying to do something a little different. You know, when I actually do live shows then it’s just a platform to try to perform things that I’ve done before, but also experiment and come up with new ideas kind of on the fly. On the live shows that I’ve done in the past I’ve always been 100% live. There’s a little bit of pre-programming and preplanning but there is also a lot of stuff on the fly. There’s no tapes or DAT things running in the background. It’s as live as it is in my studio when I’m recording. And I mean … I don’t have a drummer or bass player in my studio so I‘ m not gonna fucking bring them on stage with me.
Simon Reynold’s book Energy Flash – ten years of acid house – is a decade coming to an end?
Richie Hawtin: Everyone likes to wrap things up in 10-year-chunks, so you know there is this mass conspiracy to try and do that. Simon Reynolds has done it with his book. It’s just an easy way to understand things. You can split it up and divide it very nicely so maybe that’s why he’s done his book. And you can already see there’s a lot of people looking at the end of the century and the millennium as something very special. It’s nearly everyone’s focal point for the future, which I find kind of ironic because the last twenty or thirty years have progressed very fast with technology, and especially people I know, who have been working with technology and working with it even in the techno / dance music field,… you know we’ve been trying to create futuristic music for the last ten years. So the millennium really doesn’t mean anything to me, while everyone is looking at that as the future. It’s like you know … the future began for us in 1987, the first time I heard techno that was when the future started for me. That represented that and it represents it way beyond the millennium. The millennium is like … I think it’s just a marketing play, really.
Too much choice in the field of electronic music – too little time to check it all out?
Richie Hawtin: That’s what happened over the last – that’s progress really. people understand things, people make machines or people learn how to grow better crops and they’re able to supply a wider variety and a better quality. so at this point in the game – you know – technology has enabled the average person to pick up some equipment and to start to record. And a lot of these people have been doing really interesting things, so now you know – I know in some ways it’s a problem because there’s so much stuff out there, but I’d rather have all these different people making electronic music to kind of feed of each other and to move the whole thing forward and to progress it faster instead of just sporadic releases coming out here and there. It would just take so long for things to develop that way. … As much as it is hard for people to kind of keep up with what’s going on or to find out because there’s so many choices, that’s what it’s all about, having as many choices as possible, you know what I mean? But then there’s things like the internet and information systems which help, which are kind of bringing the world together now and helping you get the information you need. So maybe we’re just in a – like a crossover period where there’s so many choices for everyone to make but there’s not a way to figure out which choices you want; what things you want. and I think the internet and information flow will cross over between that, so in five, ten years there’ll be ten times more choices but you’ll be able to do a much more definitive search for exactly what you like as a person and hopefully something, someone, or some computer, or some instrument will kind of say, „well you should check into that.“ So, … hopefully, it’s a good thing.
Distribution via MP3:
Richie Hawtin: I don’t know whether it’s gonna be MP3 being the standard. There’s a lot of people against it. Everyone knows, whoever controls the standard is gonna be a billionaire in the next millennium. So, there’s a big fight over that. It’s like the wild west. When people started the railroads, as people started newspapers. Whoever did that first was laughing and so people are using this historical retrospective to kind of say „okay, let’s all try these different formats and figure out who’s gonna win.“ but of course – you know – people are lazy, generally. people – if they can sit at home and get force-fed, you know, TV and music, or even get what they want delivered to them without going out of their houses that’s what they’re gonna do – most people. And so that is basically the future: there’s digital TV already happening, there’s digital radio stations now, and the next thing is just digital distribution. Why? You know, I like buying a record. I like buying a CD, I like having it in my hand. But there’s also times when I don’t like – you know – like I’m on tour; there’s a lot of CDs I’d like to have with me, but I don’t wanna be carrying these around. And maybe I just wanna hear that one track today and I won’t wanna hear it again for six month. So why – if there was a way of just saying, „I wanna hear this track now, I’ll pay five cents or – you know – one mark to hear it now, then send it to me, let me hear it and then I can go on to the next track.“ There could be some great benefits to that type of technology. It’s gonna happen.
MP3 players:
Richie Hawtin: I have one which is 32 megs. It’s alright. But again it’s still not perfect because they’re still about as big as that, and they can be a lot smaller, but there’s a number of different companies from Korea and there’s even … I think the Soundblast people are making them. so it’s … I don’t know like I said whether MP3 is going to be the standard, but there will be a time for sure when you just choose what tracks – you’re going out of the door, you wanna hear some tracks, you load up your little thing, and you walk out, you listen to them and beyond that — five, ten years from that point — you won’t even have to decide what tracks you want to hear until you want to hear ‚em. And they’ll just be beamed down to you. There’s three different satellite systems going up now, one being iridium for the phonaton (?) network, which is a global phone you can use anywhere. You’re never out of contact. So that’s the first step. As soon as they have all the phones wired up that way, the next thing is start delivering – well, this phone’s a digital anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you’re sending a voice or anything, you’re sending zeros and ones. So if someone’s got an iridium phone and wants to hear an MP3 file or a music file, it’s technically possible that they could just beam that to them. If you can talk real-time you can send music, and so it’s not a question… it’s gonna happen. It’s just a matter of is it gonna be five years, ten years or twenty years. And it’ll probably be the smaller one.
Retro equipment:
Richie Hawtin: Yeah, I use old equipment, but I use a combination of old, new and … you know I don’t use old equipment because it’s old. I use things that I like. Some of that happens to be old. I’m changing all the time, but I’m also always … I flew to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago just to go to the AES, which is where they show all the new equipment. I know people who say, „you don’t need to go to that. You can just use 909s and 303s.“ You know. I like those but there’s a way that uses those and also modifies them with new technology. It’s using everything for its full … for an advantage and using it to its potential. Some things from a couple of years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, seem to do better things than some of the things now. Some things now do things that was never even thought possible five years ago so by combining those you hope to come up with something different. And I don’t think techno music is about using the newest forms of technology. It’s about using technology – period! Using it to move things forward, progress, and make something new and interesting and make what I would call some type of futuristic music.
What is new? Aren’t we limited by tone scales, bar scales, rhythm patterns, etc.
Richie Hawtin: Yeah, but we’re only limited by one’s imagination and what technology is out there. So what we think is possible today or what’s in our head, – maybe we can’t get exactly what’s in our head out today, but probably the only reason of that is because of technology and tomorrow or right now in Japan, there’s probably some scientist tinkering away making something which is gonna make sounds which we’re gonna be like, „what the hell is that?“. And so every day as technology moves forward we’re offered more and more potential, a wider palette to use and use to create with. You know people can say techno is dead, or techno is boring now, but the idea of techno and electronic music to me and to a lot of the Detroit people I believe was that it was a futuristic music and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to make music — you know spacey music, but just music which is progressive and looking to tomorrow.
How do you rate „early“ electronic music today – like Juan Atkins early works?
Richie Hawtin: It’s not always just the sound, it’s also the idea and the theory behind it, the approach. Juan Atkins was approaching it and kind of make music like no one else. Trying to make futuristic music, so maybe now it doesn’t sound as cutting edge as what’s today but in some ways it’s just as futuristic if not more than what people are making today. ‚Cause someone is probably kind of using your statement and saying. „Well, I’m using the newest things. everything I’m using in my studio was made this year so I must be able to make the most craziest electronic“ – you know … so, it’s not true, it’s a philosophy.
What do you think about the statement that in the old days everything was better?
Richie Hawtin: Yeah, but that happens with everything. people get used to things, they understand things better and things don’t hit them, or they don’t react to things as much. We all heard 909s and all those different things a thousand times so it’s very hard to do anything with any of those to make it – again make it sound like „wow, what is that?“ You never gonna do that to a 909 ever again. Maybe if someone puts it through some crazy box it will. But there is times when you still hear those records and that still gives you some kind of feeling or some kind of some kind of „wow, I haven’t heard that before.“ And that’s what a lot of people are trying to do. It’s not gonna happen every day, but it’s still gonna happen. And I think it would be stupid to think it’s gonna happen every day. Think about other types of music like a lot of traditional music really haven’t developed. They change structure or musical configurations within notes or tempi and things, but the actual basis of it doesn’t really change. Electronic music may be making only small steps now but there’s still times when you go like, „wow, I haven’t heard that before.“ When was the last time someone who’s really into music hearing a pianist or a saxophone player saying, „wow, I’ve never heard that sound come out of a saxophone“ – even anything like that. It’s finite number of possibilities for those instruments. Electronic music, yes, today this is what you can do. Tomorrow? The next day?
Richie Hawtin: What about Kraftwerk – pop songs with electronic means.
Richie Hawtin: Oh yeah, that was Krafwerk’s perspective. You know Kraftwerk they were just a pop band. They wanted to make pop songs. They just happened to pick up weird equipment. And that’s why they made such a mark, because they made really good pop songs, but they made it with different things than anyone else had done before. and that’s great.
Do you consider your music to be pop music?
Richie Hawtin: No, no, I don’t think of my music as pop music, because I don’t – you know, if Kraftwerk were given guitars and stuff somehow they could figure it out to make a good pop song with that. They make good songs. It doesn’t matter if you just wrote it on a score and you gave it to a band to play it would sound good. You know it’s been done. Some kind of a quartet did string versions of Kraftwerk and it’s kind of like… It’s a bit cheesy and stuff, but it still transposes over that. It’s not the electronics. That’s part of the coolness of it and what was different about it, but it was great pop music. I was into Kraftwerk and I was never a big pop fan. But I liked Kraftwerk because they were pop but had something different about them. Traditionally, I didn’t like pop music, that’s not where I’m coming from. I probably couldn’t make a pop tune even if I tried. And so maybe if you wanna compare some electronic music to what’s come before, people like Kraftwerk, people like that … yes I use electronic equipment but that’s the only comparison.
What did you listen to before you got into techno?
Richie Hawtin: Well, I listened to things like that, I listened to things like Nitzer Ebb, I listened to some electro, which were … considering what I like now – were more pop formatted things, but as I got more and more into electronic music I progressively – I guess – stripped away what I didn’t want from what I felt was necessary. And I’ve gotten further and further away from liking – I guess – pop music. You know, I don’t hate pop music. If someone makes a great tune I may like it. Like last year that track – that Lovelee Dae track (Blaze), that house track. That’s a great pop song. It’s a great track and I used to play it; but it’s few and far between. You get those and they’re great for me and other than that it’s … you know, those kinds of things are very easy; anyone can get into that. I want something a little bit more challenging. I think that’s what it comes down to.
What influences you today?
Richie Hawtin: It’s like a cross between everything. I get influenced from what I’ve done and what I haven’t done. I get influenced from old stuff I listen to like Nitzer Ebb or Miles Davis. I listen to a lot of Miles Davis. Even a lot of innovations from people from Germany like Basic Channel and Porter Ricks, that whole school, you know. I get influenced from people who are either doing something new or stood for … did something new at their time. You know like Miles Davis was out there; he was doing things that no one else had ever dreamed of and people didn’t really pick up everything he did. It’s just kind of like people went off in another direction. So, people who’ve done that, books I read, whatever … life.
Your old time faves?
Richie Hawtin: That changes from day to day. Any of the early works by Miles Davis. If anything influenced me on this album especially on Consumed … That’s all I listened to when I was recording that album. I really like the spaciousness of what he was doing. I like the concept that he used to miss out notes and let the listener fill them in or not fill them in. It’s an interesting concept. And other things: „It is what it is“, Derrick May; you know Rhythim is Rhythim. „Joining the Champ“ by Nitzer Ebb. It’s a funny track. And there’s a track, actually a really amazing track is a track by Global Communications but they recorded under the name of Link, and it was called „Amenity“. And it came out on their label five/six years ago. And it’s an amazing, amazing track. I play it at the ends of my sets. It’s been in my crate for years. Only when everything has come together at the end of a set. Not only when I’ve played well but the crowd has reacted and there’s something’s special between you and them. And everytime you play it … you know … it’s an amazing track.
Remixing:
Richie Hawtin: Well, I’m a hypocrite. I hate remixes. I didn’t want it in the beginning, because …but it actually was a good way to make money fast. And when I first started I needed money to set up my studio, so I thought, „oh, I’ll do a couple of things here and there.“ And I’m glad I did them. You know what I mean. It was either that – either do a remix here or there – or get another job. I wasn’t gonna get a new job. Then in 92 / 93 / 94 I started doing more and more and some of them are … you know… the challenge in remixing for me is: I don’t sample in any of my tracks. I won’t see any … maybe one or two: there’s a little voice sample, some kind of sound or something, but I usually don’t sample. And when you do a remix, these people send all these different samples, and you have to reconstruct and make something out of that. So it’s truly alien to what I normally do. So, that’s the challenge for me, that’s what I find interesting. But it’s very easy with the remixing to get pulled into a totally different realm of thinking, because for remixing you can get paid shitloads of money. And I remember 94 / 95 it started to get like that. I was doing things for New Order and some other people. And … I did this one remix and it was a terrible remix and I got paid shitloads of money and after that I remember I just saying like, „that’s it! no more remixes.“ And I took a couple of years off just to get it out of my system, beause I’ve seen so many people got down that line and end up screwing their careers up.
Remix projects of Richie Hawtin material (Thomas Brinkmann’s Concept Variations):
Richie Hawtin: I never was interested in the idea of having anyone remix my work. This is where I’m a bit of a hypocrite because I remixed other people’s work but …it’s a strange thing: they usually do it for marketing technique; I don’t need to do a marketing thing to sell my music and if that’s what I have to do, I don’t wanna do it. And I feel once I’ve finished a track that’s it. I put it out: if it works it works, if it doesn’t … If somenone else has a good idea for that thing, then use that idea and make your own track. It’s electronic music. You can … you know … .That’s how I see it working. The Thomas Brinkmann thing was totally ucalled for or just came out of the blue. Thomas just showed up on my doorstep. [knock knock] „Hey, can I come in? I did some remixes of your tracks,“ and I was just like: „I didn’t ask you to do remixes of my tracks.“ And he goes, „no.“ And then he explained to me how he did it and that was the reason why I even sat down to listen to them. If he had just sampled my work, I would have … you know, I don’t even know if I would have listened to them, because the idea — the concept of it, I don’t need to do that. You know what I mean. He can be much more productive using those ideas to do his own thing. But he was like, „no, look! I’ve done this with these turntables.“ He was coming from nearly more of an art perspective. He wanted to just change people’s perceptions by something mechanical. And so as soon as he told me I was like, „well, that was one of the reasons I set up Concept and my label M_nus to try new things, to try and cross whether it was visual art or installation art with music and come up with new sounds, just new things. And so it was like „wow, this is perfect. Let me hear it!“ And then when I heard it … I thought maybe it’s just gonna be a good idea. You know, you have ideas which sound great in your head or the concept is great, but it actually doesn’t come across. And when I heard them I was just blown away. And so that was why I decided for that to be the first and right now the only kind of Richie Hawtin remix and I don’t have any other plans to do anything outside that. Even though I’d love to ask Thomas … He actually did a bunch of other things: he did some Plasikman stuff and we just picked the best stuff. I don’t have plans to ask him to do anything else. If he knocks on my door with a totally other alien idea I’ll listen to it, but I’m … you know, now we’ve done that, that idea is used and we’ll move on, so… . It’s been a great project and I’m glad it happened with … if it had happened with Plastikman it would have been different, because it’s a bit more of a bigger thing. Because it happened with Concept which was a very limited kind of release for me and out of everything very special for me, it was … I’m really glad it worked with that thing. Cause it worked into the concept.
Richie Hawtin – world citizen – will really everybody in this world know you at some point?
Richie Hawtin: Yeah, I think eventually. I don’t know if they gonna hear about me, but they gonna hear about people like me. You know … people doing electronics and things like this. Even if the world doesn’t physically come together, on an electronic level it’s already coming together with the internet. And it’s very easy for people… we get e-mails from people from anywhere like Alaska to Iceland to people at the treasury department of the government or the U.S. Just the strangest corporations and the strangest places. But people who are just getting turned on to this music because only now hearing about this music and a lot of them are hearing about it through the internet, so … I see the world as a small place now, just because I travel so much. and I hope that this global network or this internet or whatever it’s gonna turn itself into will help bring people together and allow people to experience new things: whether that’s music, whether it’s art, whether it’s languages, whatever …
But there is still a north-south divide.
Richie Hawtin: I think that on an electronic level it’s bypassing a lot of that and people can communicate together. If I want to communicate with you or someone else from totally different areas where there is totally different governments, totally different problems, totally different climate, we can do that. And no one can stop us. And that’s the interesting thing. And that’s what’s helping probably the world to become even if only a small bit of a better place. You know what I mean. There’s still gonna be politics, and changes of attitude between geographical regions, and things … but hopefully, with other people, the general population getting more in tune with what that guy in Germany is doing when I’m sitting in Hungaria. And what that guy down at the south pole is doing. It slowly brings our view of the world to be smaller and makes us think, „hey, maybe those people do go through the same things as I do. maybe they do have similar ideas. maybe I can understand their point of view while they’re revolting against their government there.“ And if that can happen it can only help things out.
A mission for electronic music – cutting across barrieres?
Richie Hawtin: That’s why I like electronic music. It cuts across all that. I can speak to all different types of people. If people can understand the medium of electronic music they can get the kind of feeling, the atmosphere that I’m trying to convey to them. And that’s one of the special things about this whole movement or revolution or whatever you wanna call it.
Mehr Infos zu Richie Hawtin im Internet findet Ihr auf seiner ==>M_inus Homepage