Richie Hawtin
In Erich Auerbach’s seminal text Mimesis, he opens his collection of essays with a discussion of the representation of truth in The Odyssey. In Book 19, the old nurse Eurycleia recognises her old master, Odysseus, who has returned to his home of Ithaca disguised as a beggar in order to rid his house of parasitic suitors. Upon washing his feet, Eurycleia notices a scar on Odysseus’ leg that she knows from when Odysseus was hunting many years previously. Auerbach’s point was that, like most representations of Greek Myth, characters like Odysseus do not fundamentally change in their character, even though in this case Odysseus has been away from his wife for two decades. The epic poem ends with him slipping into bed with Penelope as if nothing has happened at all. The crucial aspect of The Odyssey is that it articulates the idea of nostos, a word for “homecoming”, which for Ancient Greek culture was very tangible given that a sea journey was often a deadly enterprise. It is the root of our word nostalgia, a neologism coined to concern the idea of memory causing pain of some sort.
Now, why am I blithering on about Greek Mythology and history? You clicked on this to see what I had to say about Mr Hawtin. Say you have a binary choice between two DJs (imagine it’s a festival for example) : Richie Hawtin or Jeff Mills. Who are you going to see? Would you make a judgement on someone who preferred Hawtin over Mills? Based on the last two decades, I suspect most people with some knowledge of Techno would prefer the latter, and given Hawtin’s dalliances with various vanity projects, “Minimal”, strange live occasions, DJing on a beach with an iPad, releasing music in association with Prada, and other things it’s not worth listing, I don’t think one could blame them. For many people, there has been a consistent feeling for many that he had “let the side down”. Indeed, in 2011 a review I wrote on one of his M_nus label’s releases made me so angry that it went viral.
For myself, Hawtin along with Mills and Derrick May represented the pantheon of big-name DJs for many years. A trio (Hades, Zeus and Poseidon?) of names that, at least here in London during the 90s and 00s, were the DJs that got people through the door to make a Techno event an occasion. He represented, perhaps in a purer way at the time, the possibilities of Technology in the format of DJing long before anyone else. If anyone was trying to push the boundaries of what could be done by a Techno DJ, then in general, it was him first and foremost, even if the results didn’t always come together. The Plastikman material from the Nineties still holds up in a way now that perhaps even the early Jeff Mills records don’t, although I am at pains to point out that this is not a comparison between the two of them. There’s just something wonderfully singular about those records at that time that made them stretch across genres; Coldcut’s 70 Minutes of Madness is indicative of the fluidity of Hawtin’s records at that time. His singular DJ style and records also attracted a slavish following, perhaps helped by the clever use of a logo. Techno fans like logos don’t they? Even though the Decks, FX and 909 mix in 1999 has, in my opinion, dated somewhat, he continued to be extremely popular at a time when it felt like the genre was starting to struggle; Jeff Mills himself in my opinion, entered a somewhat pedestrian phase of DJing during this time after a stellar few years.
The Odyssey concerns the travails of the warrior Odysseus on his way home from the Trojan War. Having left his baby son Telemachus and Penelope, he takes twenty years to return home : a journey that sees him lose all of his men, spend seven years in the company of the sorceress Circe, become cursed by Poseidon and experience countless other adventures. In 2004 (some two decades ago) I saw Hawtin DJ with Ricardo Villalobos at Sonar. In my experience, some Techno fans are conservative in their tastes; it seems to attract a particular brand of four-four stomping narrow-mindedness that is particularly evident when phalanxes of men in black UR t-shirts start getting annoyed when you drop the BPM below, say, 130. And it is obvious that Villalobos, very much the avatar of Dionysus or indeed a Sorcerer in the vein of Circe, is a divisive figure; in the minds of some he is nothing short of a genius, whereas others are completely perplexed by his popularity and DJing style. Although my own perception of this timing might not be totally accurate, it does appear that this was now a new journey being plotted by Hawtin; although he had embraced the emerging minimal style years previously, it now seemed that he was at the vanguard of a new movement that would soon become extremely popular.
My recollection of Hawtin and Villalobos all those years ago is a little vague, but the “Techno nerd” look that he had pushed was now being replaced by a “fashionable” look, which then manifested itself with the haircut. Why so many people get upset with a haircut is beyond me, but there were suggestions of betrayal from the phalanxes of fans he had. No longer was Hawtin one of them, he was one of them. Crucially though, my own view of this period has never changed; Hawtin and Villalobos made a significant contribution in helping to make Techno fashionable and in doing so, rescuing it a little from oblivion. There are, obviously, downsides to this. Some people would prefer it not to be popular, for it carries with it the damning curse of making it less authentic, a crucial factor for many who care about the genre. Although much of what became known as Minimal ebbed away inevitably (I remember an interesting comparison that it was similar to Italo in being very much a continental, cosmopolitan middle-class genre of music), the circus around Hawtin and Villalobos manifested in Berlin, and by 2004 and 2005, alongside the inevitable advent of Berghain, Techno’s lifeblood had now found a new spiritual home. Would the energy of Berlin from 2005 onwards have happened without Hawtin and Villalobos? Probably, but it is also difficult to not envisage the city in this particular nascent period without them. Like Odysseus, he had embarked on a new journey replete with many dangers and wonders.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus is ship-wrecked by a vengeful Poseidon (Odysseus had blinded his son the Cyclops Polyphemus) and ends up washed ashore on the mysterious Isle of the Phaeacians. The Phaeacians are technologically advanced and utopian; they represent the best of civilisation in stark contrast to the barbarism of the lands Odysseus has visited. And although its aura as a unique place of the future is perhaps a little diminished by the advent of Seoul and parts of China, there is no doubt that the location of this mix, Tokyo, has the same echoes - it is still an enthralling and exotic place that has the capacity to hypnotise. Although Techno does feel at home in the post-industrial landscapes of Detroit and Berlin, Tokyo still represents in many ways the possibilities of the future, just as Hawtin does represent the possibilities of Techno and technology. Its place in Techno lore had been firmly embedded by Live at the Liquid Rooms and much more . Furthermore, the fact that the mix takes place in Womb metaphorically suggests that Hawtin can be reborn.
I’m not technologically conversant enough to know exactly what Hawtin is doing in this mix, and personally I don’t really care either. I have never been one for absolutism in terms of format or what a DJ uses to do their thing. I suspect it’s a technological upgrade of Traktor/Ableton, with FX and whatever else. For me, what is important is what comes out of the speakers, and I was pleasantly surprised by what seems to be something of a return for Hawtin, two decades on. The nostalgia that I felt upon him laying down two hours plus of 140 bpm+ kinetic Techno, expertly mixed with plenty of tension and crowd-pleasing energy was pretty surprising if I’m honest; this seemed like the Hawtin of a much earlier era. It was if we had rediscovered the scar and the old warrior, away on a journey, had returned. All he needs to do is, well, lose the haircut and the circle will be complete.