Minimal techno king to rock

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Almost 20 years since he started spinning a brand new sound, which the world would later come to know as ‘minimal techno’, Richie Hawtin gears up for his first India tour.

Richard ‘Richie’ Hawtin is on the lookout for newer audiences upon whom he can unleash his tunes. “I feel lucky to be doing this tour. Of course everyone had heard of Goa and the trance scene that it had going in the 90s. But it’s only in the last three-four years that I started becoming aware of India’s emerging interest in EDM,” he says.
So how does it feel to be one of the pioneers of the music and still be relevant and popular, decades hence? “I am lucky to have grown up with the scene. We progressed and evolved together and it was all very organic,” he says. A lot has changed since those early years yet apparently nothing has. “The one constant thing about this genre is that it will always be tied to future. But the spirit is the same. Sure, production techniques are vastly different from when I started out. And also our audience now listens to the music differently. Earlier, electronic and techno music was restricted to clubs but now you find people plugged to iPods, listening to the sounds.”
He is synonymous with his iconic raves and mad parties of 1990s in the States. So what’s a Richie Hawtin party really like? “I like to get rid of all references to the location. So whether it’s a warehouse in Detroit 20 years ago or a club in Ibiza last summer, the music remains the foundation. But your other senses have to be stimulated as well. The lighting, the vibrations and the smells — they all play their part in making it an ‘experience’. Before starting to play, I generally get in amongst the crowd and walk around. I never know what I am going to play till I get feedback from the crowd,” he says.