Richie Hawtin

Richie Hawtin has made his mark on electronic music by being both inventive and innovative. With almost twenty years of DJ experience, Hawtin has headlined some of the most prestigious festivals and events in club culture to date and continues to define rather than follow musical trends. His career takes him all over the world with tour dates in over 25 nations on average each year.

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, 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 Plus8 and MINUS Records, nurturing a plethora of talent from Speedy J in the early 90s to Gaiser in the 2010s. And, of course, he is Plastikman, perhaps that most of all, 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, former Creative Director at Dior, 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 centre-piece for their annual fund- raiser. A special Plastikman show in November that year, constructed around an LED obelisk and with music specifically composed for the occasion, awed everyone present and pushed Hawtin through a six year creative block to complete his latest Plastikman album "EX", the first full studio album in over a decade. “Going to the Guggenheim to make a site-specific work was one of the most incredible experiences,” he explains, “It put me put me back in the studio, inspired me to make new material and in five days I'd finished the new album. Music came out of me because of the opportunity to play in this beautiful architectural space renowned for art not music. It allowed me to step very far from dancefloor, gave me a huge amount of freedom back. Art and music, architecture and music, painting, sculpture - these mediums live together.”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 5000 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' exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris to re-score Dimitri Kirsanoff's silent film "Brumes d'automne” (1928). Then there's his ongoing work with his younger brother, the established graphic artist Matthew Hawtin who has been involved in visually representing much of Richie Hawtin's work throughout his career. Most recently the pair's Contained concept pieces created a sensation at Art Basel/Art Miami 2013, with the duo combining visual art and pop-up musical performances based around shipping containers in the city's famed Wynwood Design District.“Art and music were always synonymous when we were growing up,” Hawtin recalls, “We lived together for about 8 years and I would walk through his art studio, see what was on the walls, go to my music studio to make noise. The soundproofing wasn’t good so as he was painting he’d hear what I was doing. There was always an unspoken discussion about what I was working on and what he was working on. Over the years we did a lot of travelling together. We started to have this night and day creativity. In the daytime we'd go to art galleries see Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, and at night we'd be hearing Jeff Mills. Somehow it all made sense to us. We want to represent this synchronicity.”The Hawtin family moved from the Oxfordshire village of Middleton Cheney, UK, to Ontario, Canada, in 1979 when Richie was nine years old. His father, a robotics engineer, encouraged his son's interest in music and technology. To this day Hawtin remains at the forefront in this area. A beta-tester for sequencing software Ableton Live as far back as 2000, he has also worked closely with Native Instruments, notably on their Traktor Scratch programme. On 2008's Contakt Tour with fellow MINUS artists such as Magda and Troy Pierce, Hawtin jammed on Wireless Audio Workstations using brand new technology such as the Lemur Controller. His own Berlin-based development company Liine have created an array of innovations, from the Synk app, which allowed users to interact with Plastikman's live tour in 2010-11, to the Smudge app, which synchronized with audio-visual installations at his ENTER. Residency in Ibiza in 2012.It was always thus. The teenage Hawtin was into Detroit techno in the mid-80s, then a nascent underground machine music rather than a popular style. He became a DJ, setting up Plus8 with his friend John Acquaviva, with whom he would later co-found the online dance music hub Beatport in 2004. He set the techno world alight with Plastikman's birth on the ’Spastik' single and 'Sheet One' album in 1993, the latter arriving in a cover that looked like blotter acid. Where Plastikman began as stark techno, it would later bloom into more thoughtful fare such as 1998's strange, wonderful "Consumed" album.Hawtin ruled '90s techno from his base in Windsor, Ontario, via Detroit, his public image that of the ultimate techno boffin, shaven-headed, serious, with glasses. Things changed after the millennium. He moved to New York for ten months then headed for Berlin where he grew his hair, lost the glasses and threw himself wholeheartedly into the lifestyle. There was concurrently a huge interest in minimal, a stark stripped techno style pioneered by Hawtin and revelled in by all at MINUS. It was a phase that energized clubland, chucking out cheesiness and taking dance music back to its percussive roots. Hawtin's close association with Sven Vath at this time tempered the dark twitchiness of his Plastikman persona, bringing out his inner joie de vivre. His residences at Vath’s Cocoon nights in Ibiza finally allowed him to fall in love with the island after a rocky start there back in the '90s. It was the beginning of a new era.In 2012, Hawtin created his incredible ENTER. experience at Space, Ibiza, a distillation of his vision, a five-room adventure impeccably designed, boasting all-night ecstatic dancing and, as importantly, a Sake Bar, which provides five unique and delectable ENTER.sakes. Then there's Hawtin's personal favourite space, the glowing, psychedelic, womb-like Mind Room, marinating in avant-abstract electronica. For 12-14 weeks between 2012 and 2015, 7000revellers gathered, drawn by the power of “the dot”. ENTER.'s black spot logo, part total eclipse silhouette, part minimalist art statement, and all marketing genius, bespatters the white island all summer, from temporary tattoos to beach balls to the cannon confetti that rains down on ENTER's dance floor. ENTER. has evolved into huge global shows in Amsterdam, Japan, London, Madrid and Mexico.Then again, with Hawtin a new era is usually just around the corner. In January, 2016, he called an end to ENTER. in Ibiza, driven by his desire to focus his attention on an array of new projects. He has always changed yet always stayed the same, remaining true to his core ideals but driving forward at speed to see what he can achieve. Nowadays his position as a statesman for dance music is acknowledged. At the CNTRL series of lectures in 2012, he toured America's universities, putting the country's current electronic dance boom in context. If that was about giving the musical present historical perspective, CNTRL returned in 2015 with an 8 date US Tour with lectures at colleges in the day and club shows in the evening, the talks stroked provoking ideas and practices for burgeoning musicians, producers and DJs. In 2015, his commitment to education, was solidified, when he received an Honorary Doctorate Of The University Of Huddersfield for Outstanding Contribution to the world of Music- Technology. The year before, AIM aka the Association for Independent Music, gave him the Outstanding Contribution accolade for his dedicated to the sector.To mark Plus 8 Records reaching 25 years of age, Hawtin wrote and released an entire album of new material under the various recording aliases he’s used in that time. Titled "From My Mind To Yours", it was the first dancefloor material from him for some time. Alongside the new recordings and taking the ENTER.Concept worldwide, Hawtin started 2016 by announcing a partnership with product designer Andy Rigby-Jones, Allen & Heath and parent company Audiotonix to create Play Differently. The group will release products which will expand the creativity of today’s generation of electronic music artists. Richie Hawtin will, as ever, be revelling in the possibilities of whatever comes next....

Born and raised in Washington, DC, Oliver Caine found a passion for music at a very early age. Eventually saving up enough for a bass guitar at age sixteen, and later on the drums, Oliver was soon playing in bands in the D.C. and Virginia area. It wasn't until 1999 that he fell in love with electronic music and never looked back. By 2003 he had purchased turntables, practiced relentlessly, and began to play out at various venues in the D.C./VA area. After moving to South Beach in 2004 and gaining exposure to Miami's underground Dirty House and Tech scene, Oliver soon began spinning at numerous clubs and afterparties in Miami, VA, and D.C., perfecting his signature blend of dark, underground, House and Techno.Today, Oliver Caine resides in Virginia, and is a regular in the D.C. and NYC club circuits. He continues to perform across the United States and abroad. With notable gigs and stellar performances at Coco Maya during the BPM festival in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico; and in Detroit during the famed DEMF(Movement) festival. Oliver’s momentum and fan base continues to grow while playing alongside such greats as Chris Liebing, Joseph Capriati, Victor Calderone, Paco Osuna, Carlo Lio, Pan-Pot, Marc Houle, Sian, Timo Maas, Steve Rachmad, Adam X, and countless others.Other activities include being selected as a featured artist on the Underground Movement Show(UMS) with a live webcast and interview on ElectronicRhythm.com, guest DJ spotlight and mix on Clubbers Guide New York(CGNY), podcasts for Auricle Records, Fnoob Techno Radio, GMB, feedtheraver.com, and Dusk til Done; frequent appearances on WRIR radio, and a slew of other podcasts and gigs around the U.S. and abroad.Being a true veteran now of 15 years in the underground House/Techno scene. Oliver Caine has definitely played an integral role towards curating, crafting, and promoting the underground music scene as a whole. Always adapting to his environment and the mood of the party, Oliver is comfortable spinning deep and minimal sounds in small lounges, or banging out big room Techno in the largest super-clubs.Arriving right on time for the very first installment of “Chasing Sundays”. We welcome power forward, Oliver Caine to the rooftop terrace! Live and direct with rich track selections, Oliver always aims to deliver. There’s no tricks. No gimmicks. Just true unadulterated vibes…hidden, hungry, and ready to take you on a journey like no other!

DJ Lisa Frank, a household name in the electronic scene of Washington DC, has garnered an almost cult like following in the electronic world of our nation's capital and it is easy to see why after catching her spin live. A steady dance floor seems to be inseparably paired with her hard hitting techno sets.Perhaps a rebellious response to her first encounters with music which consisted of the rigid and methodical regimen of the Suzuki piano method, DJ Lisa Frank has branded herself with wild, saturated colors of love and light (How fitting, then, that her moniker is inspired from the stylized, psychedelic illustrator who was so popular in the 80s and 90s). Nothing about her demeanor behind the decks, however, is fluorescent. She mixes punchy selections without missing a beat and hear tenacious focus on the vibe is undeniable. It is an attitude you can feel on the dance floors of U Street Music Hall, the world renowned DC dance club where she worked for years, which lead to her current DJ career.She relentlessly promotes the local scene of DC most notably with ROAM - a party she develops alongside Chris Nitti (U Street Music Hall) and Sami Yenigun (1432 R). ROAM is a party made up of a hodge podge collection of venues and DJs - it literally "roams" around DC with throngs of loyal party freaks following its wake, whether it's a day long outdoor summer fete or a moody and deep after hours jam leading into the early hours of the morning.- Joyce Lim (1432 R, Extended Family