Richie Hawtin

Born in Banbury, England, in 1970 and raised in LaSalle, Ontario, near Detroit, Richie Hawtin was shaped by direct contact with the Midwest techno scene before contributing to its development in the early 1990s. Together with John Acquaviva, Hawtin founded the Plus 8 label, which became an anchor for a hard, functional, and futuristic techno aesthetic. At the same time he developed the Plastikman project, which is more minimal, acid-inflected, and introspective. This identity takes shape on albums such as Sheet One (1993), Musik (1994), Consumed (1998), Closer (2003) and EX (2014), where Hawtin works with repetitive structures, dry basses and a tightly controlled sense of space. Under his own name he also established himself as a DJ and producer through a minimal techno approach focused on the continuity of the mix, variations in texture and long rhythmic progressions. Living at different times in Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom, he moved between the scenes in Detroit, Berlin and Ibiza while launching the M-nus label, which supported a new generation of techno artists around the turn of the 2000s.