From Kent Williams Sent Tue, Feb 22nd 2000, 19:40
From Kent Williams Sent Tue, Feb 22nd 2000, 19:40
This last saturday night I had the privilege to participate in a very special event for my town -- the University of Iowa hosted a stop of Richie Hawtin'sDecks Efx and 909 tour. This event is was the brainchild of Megan Bygness and Vince Woolums, who worked very hard for months to make this event a success. A large cast of volunteers were involved as well, all of whom worked toward the same end. The venue was the upstairs ballroom in the IMU (student union). In addition to music it included a multimedia art exhibition by local students, and an event program was printed that included essays by several participants. The ballroom has a wood floor and wood paneled walls, which helped to create a unique acoustic space -- warm and reverberant without being muddy. Over the stage a large movie screen was pulled down, and all night local video artists were mixing live video and projecting it over the stage. The only lighting in the hall was a lamp behind the DJ area, the video projection, and computer displays around the perimeter of the room, making for a very warm, dark ambience. Sound was done by Scott Rexroat, who designs and builds his own large PA cabinets. The sound quality was like a really good home audio system, only with 10,000 watts of clear, undistorted sound. Local DJs Meshuggah and Vince Woolums opened the night, and played excellent sets. Then Clark Warner played a mix of very lush moody techno that matched the room ambience. Dale Lawrence (Theorem) followed with an amazing live set that encompassed tracks from "Ion" and some unreleased material. The dubby bass in Theorem's set worked well with the sound system, which was able to pump out bass down below 20hz. Richie came on and absolutely burned the house down with his set. It wasrelentlessly banging, but at the same time endlessly dynamic. The effects and the SH101 were used sparingly, but he did some great segments of live 909 improvisation. I guess 10 years of caning the 909 has paid off for him, since his mastery of it is second nature. He built up a couple of improvised tracks in tap write mode that were amazing. The crowd was most definitely up for it as well. Towards the end of the set we were all going completely mental. Afterwards Richie was all smiles, apparently having enjoyed himself. Scott Stone (another local) finished up the night on a more dubby, chill house vibe, to a much smaller crowd who were still appreciative. Beyond the performances, it was really the first party in a long time that had a distinctively positive vibe. I think that a big contributing factor was that the venue was alcohol and smoke free, which both the event staff and University security strenuously enforced. This tended to sort out the people who saw it as an occasion for a substance binge, who in my opinion are who spoil a lot of parties. The vaste majority of the crowd were peaceful and appreciative, and often very young. There's a certain anti-candy raver sentiment among people who've been around the scene for a while, but I tend to look at it from the opposite point of view. Isn't this precisely the sort of thing that we want young people experiencing? They're the ones that will be running the scene when we're too old for this shit any more, and we should be showing them how it's done. At this point the whole 'candy' phenomenon has a tinge of nostalgia about it. They're trying to retrieve a feeling that we old-schoolers describe from years ago, much like young deadheads are trying to get a taste of the 60s glory days 30 years after the fact. And this party for me had an old school feeling. This was helped out by all of the people I've known in the scene for years were there. It also included a couple of people who babysat my own children when they were small, who are now in their early 20s. Definitely a reunion of sort. My involvement in the event included helping Scott R with the sound, and with asking questions at a pre-event discussion with Richie. The discussion was interesting and fairly relaxed. The m-nus crew have it on digital video, so who knows if any of it will end up in the public record. Richie answered questions for over an hour, and I think tried sincerely to give people an idea of what his artistic goals are. Some of the points of the discussion that stuck in my head, and I'll paraphrase them here but I must provide a disclaimer: this is my recollection 3 days later of an hour of dialog, and I don't speak for RH. 1. He said that when he makes tracks, he's 'reactive' -- meaning that he is in some sense reacting both to his own body of work and the larger body of work he hears and plays as a DJ. He seems to both want to avoid repeating himself, and to avoid doing what everyone else is doing. As an example, "Orange" was a track he did because he hasn't used sampling very much in his tracks. So building a track around digital sampling is a step away from what he's done before, but more than that, it's also an attempt to not do what everyone else does with samples. 2. He is very enthusiastic about technology providing the tools for individual expression. The point being that with sufficiently mature and powerful tools, an individual will be able to work alone, both in audio and visual mediums, where before they would have to rely on others to help them out. 3. Someone brought up the issue of race relations in the Detroit techno community. This proved to be the most difficult question for him, judging by the amount of time he took to answer, and how carefully he appeared to be choosing his words. In the end what he said was that before moving to Detroit, both his environment in England and family upbringing basically didn't consider race, and that he had to learn very much the hard way about the racial dynamics in Detroit. Again I don't want to be putting words in his mouth, but that was my understanding. My perception of him while he answered the question was that he was trying to answer sincerely in such a way that he wouldn't be misunderstood. I felt sympathy for him based on my own experience; in an inherently racist society like the USA, people of good will, who want to do the right thing, are faced with conundrums. How do you acknowledge race positively without seeming to acknowledge it negatively? How do you understand and empathize with people whose life experiences are so different from your own? And most of all, how can you communicate when the very language conspires against understanding? Anyway, much thanks and respect to all involved in making this event a success -- the local volunteer staff probably comprised 25 people, all of whom worked like dogs all night, and worked like dogs again on Sunday loading out the PA equipment. I helped for a while with the load-in, and let me tell you, moving 500lb speakers up 3 flights of stairs is no picnic! kent williams -- xxxx@xxxxxx.xxx kent williams -- xxxx@xxxxxx.xxx