Here’s a great photo I found on Flickr, of Richie Hawtin and the current digital DJing setup he’s using.
Richie Hawtin @ Nocturnal Festival 2008 – Los Angeles, CA : 13.09.2008
Photo by Caesar Sebastian from Flickr
I didn’t feel like spending $130 (or how ever much it was) to go to Future Music Festival 2009 last w/end, with Richie Hawtin being the only act on the line-up that I was interested in seeing. It seems we’ve missed out on a side-show party for him here in Sydney too, which is disappointing.
I heard Richie played well at FMF 2009, here’s what my minimal/techno DJ friend Matt Aubusson had to say about Richie’s set…
He had buuuckets of groove from start to finish. Rolling, relentless minimal techno. He started off with an errorsmith track and then went into a little bit of that clickety clackety minimal, but after about 5 mins he settled into a solid groove of proper minimal techno and never left it. He very smoothly took it up to techno for about 10 minutes in the middle, but then grooved it right out again. There were sections towards the end where he was playing kinda broken beaty stuff which was basically just bassline with a click and it sounded awesome on the system. Massively exceeded my expectations, after not being that keen on what he’s been playing recently. Given the festival setting, I was sure he was going to play that really noisey stuff they’re passing off as minimal at the moment with lots of big buildups, and pepper it with things like Spastik, Dios, Erotic City and No Control, but he never went near any of that stuff. Recognised bugger all of what he was playing – maybe half a dozen tracks. Very little ‘big techno’. He was pretty much continuously looping elements of the last track/s he had mixed before mixing a new one in. There was lots going on when he was playing the broken beat stuff – stuff that wouldn’t have been out of place on Closer, with a loop going at the same time. I think everyone there enjoyed it so much because he absolutely nailed it. And he laid off the effects too.