From the beginning, Richie Hawtin was drawn to extremes. He called his label Plus 8, a reference to the upper limit of a Technics 1200’s pitch fader. Still, the techno upstart seemed doubtful as to which pole he gravitated toward: speed or stealth? Balls-to-the-wall aggression or careful restraint? On his earliest singles, Hawtin planted his flag in pounding rave mayhem. A UK native who had grown up in Windsor, Ontario, a stone’s throw from the Motor City, he tossed down the gauntlet on tracks like 1990’s “Technarchy,” determined to out-hardcore Detroit techno’s pioneers at their most bruising. But on his first two albums, released within mere months of each other in 1993, ambivalence took hold, and he shuttled between apocalyptic bunker busters like “F.U.” and “Smak” and sweeter, more contemplative tracks like “A New Day” and “Plasticine.”
On 1994’s Musik—recently reissued in celebration of its 30th anniversary; the vinyl has been remastered from the original tapes—Hawtin finally chose sides. The shaven-headed DJ was rapidly becoming famous for the parties he was throwing around the Detroit area, covering crumbling warehouses in black plastic and bringing in enough sound to make the floors shake. But unlike those overwhelmingly physical experiences, the introverted Musik was geared toward the mind, reconfiguring acid house’s familiar contours according to new specifications: spare, trippy, and, often, disorientingly slow.
Hawtin had already laid the groundwork for this new sound with Plastikman’s 1993 album Sheet One, turning the undulating waveforms of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer into something graceful and liquid—a far cry from the guttural squelch with which it had been associated since Phuture’s 1987 ur-anthem, “Acid Tracks.” On Musik, Hawtin continued to find new ways to make the 303 sing, using its trademark quirks to generate uncannily expressive tones that resembled the keening of forlorn cyborgs.
After an introductory stretch that resembles the eerie moan of whale song—a fittingly new-age reference for an album aimed at the intersection of ambient and techno—“Konception” introduces us to Hawtin’s trademark acid line by way of a sort of opening soliloquy: a four-note sequence that slips and rolls like beads of quicksilver before disintegrating into dub delay. It’s a simple up-and-down riff, but the 303’s filter, which works by masking or revealing the frequencies inherent in any given tone, gives it a strange, mysterious shape, as though it were vibrating in midair, appearing and disappearing at the same time, translucent and unstable. The riff would be monotonous if it were not constantly in motion, morphing subtly, sometimes imperceptibly, with every bar. Every other element in the track—stolid kick drum, syncopated woodblocks, tension-stoking claps—feels intended to frame and highlight the acid line’s ephemeral outline.
Acid’s undulating tones dictate the album’s shape and flow. In “Outbak,” they take the form of a sweeping, laser-like beam, anticipating the darkened dronescapes of 1998’s Consumed, the pinnacle of Hawtin’s brand of minimalism. In the conga-driven “Ethnik”—the rare Plastikman track to gesture at a universe beyond its own event horizon—they are braided together to resemble flutes. Only in “Marbles” does the 303 assume acid’s more conventionally gravelly form, slipping into a pugilistic syncopated pattern that foreshadows the aggression that big-beat acts like the Chemical Brothers would harness just a few years down the line. In Hawtin’s hands, though, even the most buzzsaw tones remain fundamentally hypnotic, wreathed in reverb and melancholy; the filters’ long, gradual arcs impose a glacial pace that muffles the impact of the jabbing bass riffs.
The album’s highlight is the 13-minute epic “Plastique,” in which a pair of contrapuntal acid lines shimmer, wraithlike, in the middle distance; the background is streaked with the lamentations of what might be sickly birds. Part of what makes the 303 sound so otherworldly is its portamento, or glide, setting, and here, Hawtin uses it to escape the 12-tone scale: Sliding from note to note, his riffs often seem to land just shy of a whole or half tone, lending his melodies a weird microtonal cast. In contrast to the slipperiness of his 303s, the drums seem all the more rigid: The hi-hats dance like chef’s knives; kicks and snares dangle like the weights on an old-school doctor’s scale; the handclaps might be bear traps snapping shut.
Many of the album’s chief innovations, in fact, are rhythmic. That’s thanks largely to Hawtin’s choice of tempos. Only “FUK,” a bare-knuckled percussive workout, “Goo,” and the monotone “Marbles” are pitched at a conventional dancefloor pace; the rest of the album’s tracks hang in an elastic interzone, between 95 and 110 BPM, that Hawtin enlivens with bursts of triplets and 32nd-note fills. The drums—mostly Roland TR-909, a machine distinguished by its fat, rich tones—strut and bounce; rock-steady riffs explode into fractals. On more insistent tracks, like “Kriket,” rhythmic phrases lock together in complex call-and-response patterns, spinning like one of M.C. Escher’s staircases. On slinkier cuts, like “Plastique,” the overall effect is a kind of gracefully meticulous swagger, at once flamboyant, carefree, and clinically precise.
Frustrated that his debut long player, F.U.S.E.’s Dimension Intrusion, was an anthology of previously released tracks, Hawtin was determined that Sheet One, his first Plastikman album, would feel like a proper full-length, and with Musik, he doubled down on that aim, complete with a long, scene-setting introduction and emotional denouement, the poignant “Lasttrak.” While some of the album’s songs make spellbinding standalone cuts, others—like the two-minute interstitial “Goo,” or the droning “Outbak”—feel insubstantial on their own. Together, though, they contribute to a remarkably focused vision. (Only “Ethnik” breaks the mood.) Hawtin loved both the madness of the most unhinged rave and the sensorial clarity that came with the most solitary introspection. On Musik, he poured the former into the latter, fusing techno’s adrenaline rush with ambient’s heightened state of perception, setting a new course for generations of psychedelic travelers to follow.
