Richie Hawtin

Richie Hawtin is a genuine original. His critical acclaim spans the creative realm of the fine art community to the technological vanguard. Meanwhile, as a performing artist, he is constantly pushing conceptual frontiers, moving things forward, and welcoming as many as he can to ideas and experiences that would have seemed pure science fiction when he began his career.

Hawtin is British-born and Canadian-raised. He is the business mind behind the labels Plus 8, MINUS Records, and From Our Minds, nurturing a plethora of talent from Speedy J in the early 1990s to Gaiser in the 2010s. And, of course, he is Plastikman, perhaps that most of all, an electronic musician par excellence, maintaining an underground agenda of avant-garde electronica over six albums (and two compilations). He returned spectacularly to the live circuit in 2010 with his Plastikman 1.5 incarnation, which held its own among the new EDM generation of Skrillex, Deadmau5, etc., stars to whom Hawtin is both old guard ambassador and hero.

It is not just the rising young talents who look up to Hawtin. Daniel Miller, founder of the seminal Mute label, referred to him as “a leader” and “a pioneer.” “The New York Times” called him “one of the electronic dance world's intellectual forces.” However, it's plaudits from other areas that showcase the breadth of Hawtin's appeal. Raf Simons, Co-Creative Director at Prada, says he listens “to Richie Hawtin's music like others listen to classical music,” calling him “the Kraftwerk of today.” In 2013, Simons asked Hawtin to put on a special performance at the Guggenheim, New York's iconic art museum, as the centerpiece for their annual fundraiser.

This has not been Hawtin's only crossover to other art forms. In June 2011, he worked with the Turner Prize-winning British-Indian artist Sir Anish Kapoor to transform the Grand Palais in Paris into a gigantic red-themed installation and cultural happening. The result was a strikingly memorable 5,000-capacity art-rave, and for the 2006 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony, he worked with Italian choreographer Enzo Cosimi to soundtrack and co-create a stand-alone dance piece. More recently, he was commissioned as part of Bertrand Bonello's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris to re-score Dimitri Kirsanoff's silent film "Brumes d'automne” (1928). Over three years, from 2016 to 2018, Hawtin presented the CLOSE live tour, launching at Coachella and taking over main stages at iconic festivals such as Sonar, Primavera Sound, and Movement in Detroit and at concert venues like The Roundhouse in London, L’Olympia in Paris, and the Sydney Opera House. Once again, in the autumn of 2020 and during a global pandemic, Hawtin and Raf Simons reconnected, this time for Prada, resulting in “Sin Thetik” being composed to soundtrack the first online-only Fashion Week in Milan. It was a spectacular collaboration. Richie Hawtin will, as ever, be reveling in the possibilities of whatever comes next.