In 2004, I traveled on a train with Richie Hawtin from his home in Windsor to Montreal for the annual Mutek festival. There, Hawtin performed his first live gig under his Plastikman guise since 1995. The performance—which attempted to stretch the limits of live music, video and light controls for the time—would prove to be a one-off.

Earlier this week, Hawtin announced his return as Plastikman with a performance scheduled at Coachella. URB caught Hawtin while on “vacation” to find out what we could about the upcoming performance.

URB: Coachella is the first announced Plastikman date since 2005 @ Mutek. Are their other dates planned?
Richie Hawtin: There will be quite a lot of activity under the Plastikman name this year, stay tuned for more details, as well as a new updated website and other surprises very soon!

The Mutek date was somewhat considered a “failure,” mostly due to technical problems. How will that be prevented?
When working with new technologies you can never be sure of success, you work towards a goal, build in redundancies, backup systems and hope for the best.  To continue forward however, one should learn from mistakes, when and if they happen.

The Mutek show was meant to be a live music/video/lighting experience. Is the new live show as ambitious?
What the Mutek show did do was set the stage for what became a very successful CONTAKT tour and show.  Using what we’ve learned both in practice during the CONTAKT shows and from what my team have experienced at the larger scale Hawtin LED shows of 2008/2009, we will continue our exploration of where audio, visuals, performance, interaction, and spontaneity meet.

What technological updates have their been since the last show?
Everything that we needed for the Plastikman Mutek show was custom; controllers, communication pipelines, hardware, protocol… you name it, we tried to create it. Because of that, everything was in early Alpha or Beta stages or release or development.  Most of these technologies and/or features have now found there way into the updates of commercially available programs that we all now have access to. By combining as much of these possibilities together in a creative way we hope to end up with a show that, although Beta/Alpha in presentation, has a strong and proven technology based under belly.  Stability is what we are after, among other things.

Does this mean a new Plastikman album is in the works?
It does mean that you’re currently bothering me in the studio to look away from my music applications and open up this email program :)

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