techno transitions
By Recording His Latest Release in Surround Sound & Allowing Listeners to “Inhabit the Album,” Richie Hawtin Again
Shatters Conventionality

Published in the November 2005 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 18 - Number 11
By Emily Tan

Richie Hawtin has spent his career pushing the possibilities of the DJ ever further into the future. By releasing booming, dancefloor-friendly albums under his own name—plus more minimal efforts like 2003’s Closer and 1998’s Consumed under his Plastikman pseudonym—Hawtin has become synonymous with the best in robust, driving techno. But making the music is only part of the equation for the Canadian-born DJ/producer.

Few DJs have ever had as much of an impact on the ways that DJs record and play music. In addition to regularly shaking dancefloors around the world, Hawtin has been deeply involved in the progress of DJ-based technologies with his input into the earliest versions of Final Scratch (together with John Acquaviva), as well as affecting the evolution of Allen & Heath’s line of Xone DJ mixers.

For his performance at Canada’s Mutek festival in 2003, Hawtin toiled long and hard with a team of engineers and designers to devise a custom-made contraption for controlling multiple parameters of a live DJ set at once, with only Hawtin himself at the controls. The final contraption included custom-fit, in-ear monitoring and bass plates for additional monitoring—during his set Hawtin stood on them and they sent low-end frequencies up his legs. One thing is for sure when considering Richie Hawtin: expect the unexpected.

Hawtin’s newest release is DE9: Transitions (Novamute/M-nus), the latest project from the series that started with 1999’s Decks, EFX & 909 and 2001’s Closer To The Edit. Upon listening to the mix, the booming 4/4 beats, icy synths and acidic tones announce that Hawtin intended for this mix to annihilate a crowded dancefloor. DE9: Transitions involved vastly more personalization and attention from Hawtin than any straight-up mix compilation he’d ever done. The mix was designed in 5.1 Surround Sound with the intent to create an all-encompassing environment wherein listeners could immerse themselves. Hawtin’s obsessive re-editing and re-creating of tracks while recording
DE9: Transitions were made possible by advances in technology, namely Ableton Live 5, that allowed him the speed of automation and the freedom to explore new sonic frontiers in far greater detail than any stereo mix would have allowed.

DE9: Transitions is 96-minutes in its entirety, with each channel having ever-shifting moments of prominence and magnitude. By Hawtin’s own account, DE9: Transitions shatters the idea of the conventional DJ mix by not only exploring the music’s time and amplitude, but also its perception and depth by accounting for three-dimensional space. The delicate interweaving of sound layers is immediately evident upon first listen. Over time, however, subtle distinctions reveal themselves in seemingly endless variations, depending on where the listener is situated in the room at any given time. Bold, audio “backbones”—such as a gut-rumbling sub-bass or a series of incisive high-hats—glue the layers of sound together and maintain a semblance of structure to this otherwise complex mix. For die-hard techno-lovers, Hawtin includes enough celestial-sounding blips and synth gurgles to titillate, while including enough disembodied Plastikman vocals to intrigue.

Hailing from Windsor, Ontario and the son of a robotics engineer, Hawtin grew-up in a household where technology was a familiar element of daily life. Inspired in his youth by the eclectic blend of music emanating from Detroit’s pirate radio stations, Hawtin’s musical tastes developed and expanded as he took to DJing in later years. In 1990 with then-partner John Acquaviva, Hawtin founded the independent record labels Plus-8 and M-nus (pronounced “minus”). As M-nus and Novamute prepared for the latest release—available on CD and DVD in both stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound audio versions, and offering original video content—DJ Times spoke with Richie Hawtin from his studio in Berlin, Germany.

DJ Times: You just previewed DE9: Transitions at Sonar in Barcelona. What are you up to now?
Richie Hawtin: I’m back in my studio in Berlin finishing the final video parts of DE9: Transitions. There’s another half-hour live section from a seven-hour party called Time Warp that I did in March in Mannheim, Germany. It’s considered the first big party of the year, just outside Frankfurt. We shot the whole gig in five cameras with my visuals guy, Ali. We compiled that performance into a half-hour chunk and I’m doing the final editing. There are two other videos on DE9: Transitions. Everything should be wrapped soon.

DJ Times: Unlike other Surround-Sound recordings, you first recorded DE9: Transitions in Surround Sound, then in stereo. What inspired you on this mix?
Hawtin: I’ve had the idea to work with Surround Sound for a number of years. I was thinking about doing the next DE9 CD, but there had to be a twist to it. A lot of the tedious chores which took the most time on my last CD, Closer To The Edit, can now be automated using software programs, namely Ableton Live. When I did the last CD, Ableton didn’t exist. Things like stretching samples and organizing them in time was before done by hand. When I say “by hand,” I mean I had to use three or four different programs and patch things together. For DE9: Transitions, Ableton was there and automated most of my workflow and let me get the idea of the mix up and running really fast. That allowed me to be able to focus my attention somewhere else. Originally, I thought I was going to go even more microscopic with the editing. The working title of this CD was Controlled Chaos, but that didn’t seem right.

DJ Times: What happened when you focused your attention elsewhere?
Hawtin: With Ableton Live, I started to mix more records on top of each other, but instead of using small pieces, I used much larger pieces.

DJ Times: Your layering of sound is clearly audible.
Hawtin: Yeah, I got the feeling that I couldn’t tell when one section was beginning and when another section was ending. I was able to delve much deeper into the idea of the transition. Then, I went deeper into the idea of moving around in Surround Sound and making an all-encompassing environment. You can tell from my albums that you can inhabit them. The technology allowed me control over much greater subtleties.

DJ Times: Did you engineer and record this CD in a commercial recording studio?
Hawtin: Everything was recorded in my studio, and then we took the final mix to the studio of Ronald Prent. He’s the resident engineer at Galaxy Studios in Belgium, and he’s a Surround-Sound genius. I had a couple of meetings with him in the early stages during the recording process, and at the end, we took the final mix to his place to tweak. The original idea was to have me go to his studio with a stereo mix and then make that into Surround Sound.

DJ Times: But you ended-up recording the CD in Surround Sound first?
Hawtin: Right. I started building the basic mix in Ableton Live with putting in a lot of information and tracks at any given time, and knowing that there was much more room to move around than before. There is a stereo mix, but the interesting thing was, because my head was working around in the placement of different areas for a Surround-Sound mix, the stereo mix is much better than it would’ve been had it come first.

DJ Times: So, even the methods you used to record in Surround Sound weren’t typical?
Hawtin: Yes. A lot of times, the Surround-Sound handbook is conservative in the way it tells you to put most of your information in stereo, put the voices in the middle, and use the rears for special effects. I have to give props to Ronald for that. He said, “Do what you feel is right for your music,” and he made me push further.

DJ Times: Further in what regard?
Hawtin: There are things in full-resolution, meaning there’s important information going on in all speakers. Not all of the time, because it’s always moving, but every speaker has its own time of importance. You can sit in the middle of the room to get the experience, or you can sit in a different area and get a totally different experience. The original intention was for this very, very intense, enveloping experience. Because everything’s aligned—it’s like a DJ mix with everything in-time—it actually does work.

DJ Times: When you previewed DE9: Transitions in New York, people were marveling at how different the music sounded based on where they moved around in the room. Did you intend for the CD to be a unique experience, where each listening is slightly different from the last?
Hawtin: All listening experiences will be slightly different, based on where you are situated, yes. One of the reasons I chose to record now in Surround Sound is because, as of September, a lot of high-end car manufacturers—like BMW and Mercedes—are installing discrete Surround-Sound systems in their cars. I really believe a huge portion of people listen to music in cars, so I think that a lot of my audience will be able to experience this CD as I intended it.

DJ Times: What was your set up in the recording studio?
Hawtin: The main technologies were in Ableton, which was our main organizational tool and where I built the basic idea of the mix. That was piped through ReWire directly into Pro Tools at 96 kHz/24-bits, which is a higher quality than most CDs. It allowed us to have more headroom and manipulate the sounds better, so we have better quality in the recording. Since I was doing this in Surround Sound, I wanted to have really precise sound quality. Pro Tools was the main environment where all of the surround placement and all of the effects went in. We used some WAVs and a lot of Eventide and Digidesign plug-ins.

DJ Times: What about outboard gear?
Hawtin: No synths. Everything was inboard. The project was so large and it was such an organizational nightmare—and we were taking it back and forth to and from the studio—that I wanted to be able to save and open up and have everything recalled. I was working on this album night and day for a couple of months. Most of the high-end effects I used on this album were Eventide software plug-ins.

DJ Times: With all of the advancements in software technology, do you consider outboard gear to be obsolete?
Hawtin: No, I don’t. In fact, I just ordered a brand new piece of outboard gear: it’s a new Eventide H8000 Ultra-Harmonizer eight-channel effects processor. I think it’s always great to have a box that does one thing and does it really fucking well. As computers get more powerful, so do small boxes. You turn it on and you know exactly what it’s going to do. The Eventide H8000 is their new top-of-the-line in Surround Sound. Nearly the whole project [DE9: Transitions], from videos to music to editing to Pro Tools, was run on a Mac dual G5 with two gigahertz and something like half-a-terabyte on the hard drive.

DJ Times: When you previewed DE9: Transitions at Sonar, did you just play the CD or re-create it live?
Hawtin: At Sonar, we previewed 15-minute clips from the CD. The idea is to think about performing live. From September on, there will be a DJ tour to coincide with the release of the CD; that will be a stereo version. Next year, I want to go quadraphonic. On my side, I can do it. It’s complicated, but not hard. Trying to get the clubs to adjust is difficult, though. Five years ago, I had a hard time getting the clubs to get specific speakers and amps so I could perform Decks, EFX & 909. Clubs just won’t do it. We did a couple of quadraphonic shows in ’98 in Detroit, for Consumed.

DJ Times: DE9: Transitions required far greater involvement from you than a typical mix compilation. It’s not an artist album, but you’ve done so much personalization with this mix that it’s really somewhere between an artist album and a mix comp.
Hawtin: There are some bits and pieces of unreleased music by me on this album and a lot of special content in it. It’s much more than a mix comp. Everything’s tweaked. Every single track has been tweaked, edited, cut, reversed or re-engineered. There’s also sounds overlaid on top, which glue sections together.

DJ Times: I hear disembodied Plastikman vocals in there, a la Closer.
Hawtin: That’s right.

DJ Times: DE9: Transitions is 96-minutes long, and you created original visual content for the DVD portion. What was that process like?
Hawtin: There is a 30-minute live mix that has the full visuals from the Time Warp gig. As far as the visuals are concerned, I really don’t want people staring at visuals. They’re going to need their whole attention to get into this music. For the 96-minute DVD version, we have the ability to turn the DVD on and the track titles fade up and down as things come in and out. I didn’t hire a graphics designer to create visuals, because my friend Ali is the only one who knows how to do my visuals. There’s already a live version of this with him. For me, I’ve seen so much shit on DVD. This album is really serious. All of the components work completely together. There are a lot of things going on, but not too much so that it distracts from the music.

DJ Times: How do you see the future of visuals for DJs?
Hawtin: There’s definitely room for visuals, but there’s room for inspired and innovative visuals that have some relevance and interaction with the music. We’ll be doing that on part of the tour, and we hope to do further Transitions releases next year.

DJ Times: What’s your DJ setup these days?
Hawtin: My CTRL:92 mixer by Allen & Heath is the main component. There’s a new Allen & Heath mixer under development that I’ll use for the tour. I’m also using Ableton Live 5. Final Scratch I’m still using. All my live DJing tools are similar, but I’m using updated versions of the hardware and software. I can get quite close to the stereo version of this album now, when I’m playing live. There’s also a new contraption that I’ve been checking out; it’s a multi-sensitive touch screen. Most screens are monophonic, meaning that you touch one finger at a time. This new contraption controls different parameters using all 10 fingers at once! It’s sick.

DJ Times: Have you ever studied keyboards or any other musical
instrument?
Hawtin: No. I was told early on, “Don’t learn anything musical.” They only teach you rules. Rules are made to be broken. It’s much harder to break rules than not to know them in the first place.

DJ Times: You’re more technologically savvy than many of your peers. I assume you didn’t work with an engineer on DE9: Transitions?
Hawtin: No, I didn’t work with an engineer. I’ve never had an engineer on any of my albums, but I’d say that Ronald was the closest thing I’ve had to an engineer, ever. There was a dialogue back and forth. We brought the mix up on his analog console at the end for the final pass-through. His console is a fully discrete analog Vision recording and mixing console by API [Automated Processes, Inc.]. Discrete analog means it’s the shit [laughs]. All of the audio passageways are discrete, meaning there are no integrated circuits. The Vision is the only analog console ever designed from the ground up for work in Surround Sound. It’s the best of old and new technology.