Richie Hawtin

Richie Hawtin
DE9: Transitions
[Mute; 2005]
Rating: 7.8

Richie Hawtin's third and final entry in the DE9 series realizes the concept driving 1999's Decks, EFX & 909 and 2001's DE9: Closer to the Edit on a weird, fuzzy-tech level. Employing a rackful of software he manipulates hundreds of track segments, song bytes, and musical layers into 28 newly-titled pieces, their internal parts laid out under each heading like the gears and sprockets of a dismantled clock. Nothing fuzzy about that; in fact, in many ways DE9: Transitions couldn't be more technical. Even its artwork is calculated, with sleek lines of ASCII text trickling steadily along behind Hawtin's holographic Bowie face. But for all its cold calculation and software product placement, Transitions is also quietly comforting. It's minimal techno married to the schematic of a goose down pillow.

A persistent BPM pads through its center, unifying the mix's hundreds of hiccups and digital spindles like the deftest of Calatrava spans. Selections like "Visioning", "The Hole", and "Weiter Noch" incorporate six, seven, even 10 primary sources. But the result is always clean and smooth, mostly because Hawtin aims for assimilation above everything else, no matter the character or duration of the building bits he uses. He's not trying to remake them in his image. The DE9 series was always about exploration, and with Transitions he's taking that notion to its purest form. Tech heads can pick the set apart surgically, trying to discern Pan Sonic's "Liuos" from Stewart Walker's "Lakewalking" inside "Visioning"'s velvety tumble. But it's more fun to enjoy its brilliant use of space, to let it drift in four directions between your headphones like a smoothly morphing color bar test pattern. Software was the facilitator, but through painstaking arrangement and meticulous layering Hawtin finds its softer side.

There's a purism question, obviously. How far did Hawtin immerse his innate ability as an arranger, DJ, and producer in the microchip acid bath to make this mix? Is the oxide of human element completely washed away? If there are computers powerful enough to toy Kong-like with our puny brains, they certainly exist in Hawtin's home base of Berlin. Those rigs could make us think of pillows where there is only polyurethane, pretend to offer a future of technology warmfuzzies when there are really only methodically blinking cursors. Yikes! But techno heads don't really believe in that kind of Cyberdyne conspiracy anymore, if they ever did. And besides, the "The Tunnel" blends elements of Detroit Grand Pubahs' "Dr. Bootygrabber" with Mika Vainio's � alias, two of Hawtin's own tracks, and Styro2000 for one of Transitions' closest scrapes to truly fervid, live-Hawtin techno. And that's an intangible that technology just can't crack.

-Johnny Loftus, December 16, 2005… (more)