Closer To The Plastikman

Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman project has always ventured into the outer reaches of techno, re-wiring the defined sound and turning a whole generation of listeners onto the music.

The debut album, Sheet One and its Musik follow up set the tone for Plastikman’s studio experiments: intricate and often disturbing, LSD-soaked visions of minimalism that, despite the presence of producers like Rob Hood and Dan Bell, were unique at the time.
In creating Plastikman, Hawtin also gave techno a style defined by its anonymity, a sense of identity. Their wired-looking cartoon character logo has been re-created on tattoos, slipmats and record bags. It also provided a wired representation for subsequent Plastikman albums, Artifakts and Consumed.
After defining skeletal minimalism, the latter work saw Hawtin immerse his sound deep in layers of viscous electronic dub. So, where does Plastikman go next?
Five years after Consumed and a decade after the birth of Plastikman, the Canadian DJ/producer has given his fans the answer in the shape of Closer, his most personal work to date.
“Last year, I went through a number of changes in my life, including splitting up with a long term girlfriend, whom I’d been with for the whole Plastikman period,” he explains. “It was a totally fucked up time for me and it stopped me in my tracks. I had never recorded my voice before this album as I usually try and capture an atmosphere or communicate with my audience through music.
“But I knew it couldn’t just be rhythms and sounds anymore, that wasn’t the way I was thinking: this time I could see voices and text as much as I did sound and rhythm.”
The producer’s personal traumas saw him make the move back from New York to his home town of Windsor in Canada. However, instead of spending time with his closest friends and relatives, he embarked on an inner migration that saw him cut off contact with everyone else.
“I needed to work on my own, and the only way to get what was in my head down was to lock myself away and live with myself for a couple of months,” he says. “I had read about people, especially rock acts, going into really intense recording sessions, where they would stay up for days, take drugs and freak out to see what happened.
“I cut myself off to get this (Closer) out of me before I would lose it and my family and friends knew what I was doing and gave me space: I was in exile, isolating myself mentally and physically. It was the most intense recording session I’ve ever had.”
Unsurprisingly, Hawtin says that Closer allows the listener the chance to get closer than ever to his persona.
“To get the full picture, you need to see and hear everything,” he believes. “It’s an all-encompassing work and if people want to understand who I was last year and what I was going through, they can put their headphones on and get closer to my head.”

Closer is out now on NovaMute. Richie Hawtin plays the Red Box, Dublin, on November 14