Art for Art’s Sake

Plastikman albums helped define acid techno’s minimal core until Richie Hawtin, the legendary DJ/producer behind the curtain, retired the moniker after the dark, abstract 2003 album Closer. A 2013 multimedia installation was one of a scant few live dates using that name since then, and the only one meriting enough new music to fill an LP. Despite going into the performance claiming this work wasn’t meant for a new album—well, here’s EX.

Hawtin’s most distinctive work under his own name was the DE9 series, DJ mixes built from pieces of other songs that got smaller and smaller as the years progressed. Yet almost exactly 20 years to the day after releasing Plastikman’s debut Sheet One, he was linking new 303-driven grooves to light and other visuals on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The resulting mix is reproduced here on EX, and despite its fresh origins it’s a cautious return to a time before molly was even a gleam in the eye of trust-fund club kids and middling drug dealers.

The music of EX introduces the conceits of minimal techno to new and lost audiences: pillowy, massive layers of bass, Morse code percussion and tightly clipped melodies. “EXtend” finds Hawtin moving his synth tension back and forth like low and high tides. “EXtrude” has him making sounds that both growl and bounce. “EXposed” suggests the music of dueling heart monitors, while “EXplore” is all high-hats and bird-call keyboards. In the live setting Hawtin also introduced some surprises on the fly, like the long ambient stretches of “EXpand” and the percussive density of “EXpire.”

And yet, all of this seems a little forced and incomplete. Tied to such a specific live context, EX doesn’t feel as important or even as welcome as a proper studio album might be, regardless of Plastikman’s name on the marquee. Further, when played at a Christian Dior event in this age of brutalist EDM, one wonders just what the evening’s hot new-money crowd (and consumers beyond) could do with such wide-open, anachronistic sounds. So it’s not immediately great that he’s back in this form, but it might be.