Techno master Richie Hawtin may be taking his DJ sets to bigger and bigger stages, but he never strays far from the underground, aiming to bring his audiences closer and closer to his early rave days with new ways of performing, imbibing and empowering creative people.
Reading his old interviews we came across this answer, how he felt the first time he went to a rave.
- My first experiences were tied to how much I love music and love to dance—I didn’t go to be entertained visually, I didn’t go to watch the DJ. Later on, I would go in the booth to observe a bit of their technique. If I wasn’t there; I was on the dance floor and I would just want to be lost in my own mind, surrounded by frequencies, hypnotized with my eyes closed. I love to get lost in the type of electronic music I play, where there isn’t an obvious vocal narrative. Storytelling through frequencies and ups and downs and tension building—that’s what I want to give people. If I do my job right, at moments people should get so sucked into the visuals that they actually don’t even know what they’re looking at anymore. I want people to lose themselves, find themselves and inhabit their own special place.