Plastikman | Live

Posted by tomo at 01:48 PM in music . | 1 Comments

On June 4th at the Mutek electronic music festival in Montreal, Richie Hawtin performed his Plastikman material live for the first time since 1995. "The performances from that era, Glastonbury, the Fuk tour, etc, have gone down in the annals of electronic music history." It took 6 months to put together and "no other shows expected at this point... and seriously, this might just be a one-off show, period!"

Hawtin has resampled and re-arranged all of the Plastikman material dating back to the first Plastikman release, Sheet One (Plus 8/Novamute) from 1993. The entire catalogue is going to be reworked and performed live on stage, using a combination of classic machines and new software to meld old and new material into unique improvised mixes. Working in the studio, Hawtin has experimented with combinations of classic Plastikman material from Sheet One, Musik (Plus 8/Novamute), Recycled Plastik (Plus 8/Novamute), Artifakts (M_nus/Novamute), Sickness (Plus 8/Novamute) and Consumed (Minus/Novamute), along with new material from Closer (M_nus/Novamute/Paperbag).

For this setup, Richie designed a custom MIDI controller called the CTRL LIVE (see pictures at plastikman.com) and used an unreleased surface controller from Tactex, using technology that company developed for the Canadian Space Arm. Ableton created a special feature in their Live software to give Richie finer control of all his parameters and Toronto-based Derivative developed custom real-time visuals for Richie to control during his performance.

This was a truly unique live event, probably the best live electronic music performance I've ever seen.. and it was as much a visual thing as aural. Richie is slated to be in Columbus on July 2nd and in Detroit July 4th, among many other tour dates. However, the Detroit show is explicitly said not to be a Plastikman | Live show. The calendar doesn't say for the Columbus (or most of the other shows). The Detroit show will probably be just a regular DJ set. But if he performs his Plastikman | Live in Columbus, it is not to be missed.