Warp Records, 1993
Windsor, Ontario. August ’92. The dead of night (his favourite time to create). The lone figure of Richie Hawtin bounces maniacally from machine to buzzing machine in his studio.
Already locked into a 30+ minute jam of rhythmical acid techno, he’s lost in the music. Part man, part Wavestation.
At once, an unholy peal of thunder strikes (with a lovely attack and some nice reverb, to be fair). His ‘lab’, under the kitchen in his folks’ home, shakes, killing the lights. The once blinking banks of humming hardware are deathly silent in the now pitch-black room.
“It was this crazy lightning storm,” says Hawtin, instantly transported back some 30 years. “And, at that point all my equipment kind of glowed, and then shut down.” 1.21 gigawatts of pure electronic power had surged directly into the heart of his signature sound modules, direct from the sky above, forever scrambling their circuit-heavy souls, and rewiring their dance music DNA. A gift from the techno gods themselves, perhaps?
“You know,” says Hawtin, still shook by the memory, “it sounds like I’m making this up. But… something happened.”
Like some kind of tidy-haired techno Dr. Frankenstein, he now stood over the once dead carcasses of his equipment. Each one now reanimated, awaiting their master’s next musical command.
He gingerly approached his hardware, picking up the jam where he left off. But, the sound had been forever altered. The
