Richie Hawtin (CA)

About

Also known as: Plastikman (Richie Hawtin), Richard Michael Hawtin, Richie Hawtin (Plastikman)

Richie Hawtin has spent three decades at the sharp edge of electronic music, most famously as Plastikman, the alias he launched in 1993 with the single "Spastik" and the album Sheet One. Born in England and raised in Ontario near Detroit, he absorbed the city's second wave techno scene and became one of the defining voices in minimal techno from the mid 1990s onward. His 1999 mix album Decks, EFX and 909 showed his obsession with sculpting live sound from effects and drum machines, and the 2014 Plastikman record EX, recorded at the Guggenheim in New York, brought that approach into striking live performance territory. Hawtin and John Acquaviva co founded the Plus 8 label in 1990, and in 1998 he launched M nus, which helped push careers of producers like Magda, Gaiser and Marc Houle. He also built PLAYdifferently, a technology company that put out the MODEL 1 mixer in 2016. His recording catalogue spans a huge range of aliases beyond Plastikman, including F.U.S.E., whose debut album Dimension Intrusion appeared on Warp's Artificial Intelligence series, and Concept 1, a run of minimal twelve inch singles that remain quietly influential.