Nostalgik 3

Nostalgik 3

Richie Hawtin / Plastikman [Minus]

18 March, 2008 | 12.31PM

• Section: Music Recommendations
• Written by: Ben Raven

Plastikman’s best loved track has had dance music in a choke hold for over fifteen years.

Loved by everyone from Mylo to Morillo, no release better captures his style than his 1993 fizzing cacophony of snare drums.

Richie’s sets have always been built around reigning in the tension of a dancefloor and tweaking out a breakdown until the club is at bursting point and then releasing them into oblivion with a techno bomb before tightening the reigns all over again.

‘Spastik’ encapsulates all the taught energy of an epic Richie Hawtin party in one tune and helped define what techno could be for years to come.

There is no melody in ‘Spastik’, an omission that breaks one of dance music’s biggest rules, “don’t forget your hook”.

But instead of a vocal or synth line drawing your ear in, it’s the energy of ‘Spastik’ and its skippy snares filtering in and out of the audio that has made it one of electronic music’s most unique of tracks.

And it’s a telling fact in itself that Ali Dubfire has remixed it.

A year ago, as one half of Deep Dish, it would seem unthinkable that Dubfire would have dropped commercial house for minimal techno — let alone be releasing tracks on Minus.

But after a year of elbowing himself into techno contention with tracks like his Summer biggie ‘Rib Cage’, Ali delivers a respectful re-rub that adds punch and power and modern production finesse without messing with the mechanics of what made the original so great.

Similarly, the rolling bassline and percussion of ‘Panikattack’ made it almost a follow up to ‘Spastik.’

Few tracks can hypnotise a club into one groove like it, and it’s telling that another current star of techno is allowed to reinvigorate it.

Guido Scheider adds percussion and weight to the original without detracting from its energy or dulling its barbs.

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