An unmitigated stomper that thrills in multiple iterations before stripping itself back and revealing the undergirding logic of its own black magic signals a legend who remains committed to process.
Far too few of us are aware that world-renowned sake sommelier Richie Hawtin is known also, in some circles, for being a fairly adroit techno DJ.
A cranking, ribald serpent of acid that propels itself off of a tough, pummeling kick, undulating into higher amplitudes to ultimately deliver venomous strikes of energy. By the time the arpeggiated acid line counterpoint arrives in a tempestuous rush, the track achieves sublime peak-time energy. The hats crackle into the red like sparks of intracloud lightening, eventually escaping into their own orbital pattern like quantum particles leaping into higher valences of motion. You close your eyes and you’re immediately in some long, dark tunnel of a club bathed in flickering red alarm light. Its a ten minute track that feels like three, achieving that rare chronokinetic magic that only exists in the most perfectly engineered techno music: where whole nights can pass in the blink of an eye; remembered not as a movie but a cutting-room experience. The release proceeds from the most to the least complex arrangement; entropy in reverse, like a mathematician working backwards from QED to help an understudy understand the feats of logic required to arrive at the final product.
The F.U.S.E. Bass dub three tracks in halves the duration of the Full Tilt Mix but amplifies the mainline, electric energy of the theoretically simple, but practically incredible motivating line of acid. The Bonus Beats layer then isolates the springy, crushing kick drum and damaged hat sequence; so that each organ of the song can demonstrate its fundamental power on a clean canvas shorn of distraction. Its almost a kind of cheat code for people interested in the fundamentals: nail the basics, and the rest doesn’t really matter. This is the stupefying thrill of a magician effectively revealing his secrets: like sitting down to watch a master apply layers of paint with the necessary precision and apparent ease of someone at the top of their field.
On the tin, this release purports to be a remix package; but each of the tracks presented is arrived at by surgical separation of the elements. Take the Full Tilt and the Stripped mixes for instance, which are separated mainly by the lack of the vocal sample saying “we will/won’t come back.” It’s almost as if he’s daring every bedroom producer in the world to give it their own spin; to discover the infinite potential of the raw material. This is a clear conceptual extension of his CLOSE COMBINED project, which allows users to be complicit in the art of the mix, giving them the ability to add and subtract layers from his CLOSE audiovisual show that debuted at Coachella in 2017. It is a demonstration and a dare.
Let us pray that Richie Hawtin lives forever.
-Winston Mann
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