Listenblog: Minimize to Maximize

Austere. Precise. Subtantial yet unpretentious. Occasionally irrepressibly funky. Those words can describe the music from Richie Hawtin's Minus label, and they are epitomized on the Minimize to Maximize compilation.

Techno is a good place to be in the world of modern electronic dance music, and minimal techno is an even better place to be. Despite the mire that has been dragging down most of electronic dance music since, oh, 2001-ish, techno has remained rather buoyant. Perhaps it's something about the nature of the music that makes it somewhat impervios and perpetual. Techno is the epitome of electronic dance music. It is the hardened core. It is the beautiful, unrefutable basics of the genre. It is the austere, robotic tic-toc that absolutely commands your booty to move and your mind to wander into shimmering futures. It is a sub-genre largely free from the weight of personalities, and, despite some contention, free of pretention. Certainly there are some heady tracks and artists out there, but, in the end, the music is based around such simple principals, with such simple construction, that it is the great equalizer of electronic music.

Techno has a reputation as the grand-daddy of the electonic dance music scene, despite well documented preliminary movements amongst electro disco and new-wave, and the preliminary development of garage and house. However, the reputation of techno as the grand-daddy does hold up in that techno a genre that, across the board, tends to distill the practices of electronic dance music to their purest and most concentrated forrm. The early work of the Detroit artists was also, without a doubt, extremely influential on the rest of the scene.

It is from the Detroit scene - particularly the second wave of the scene - that artists such as Richie Hawtin began to rise. Richie's blaring and acid-drenched work as FUSE was followed by the increasingly minimal and massively atmospheric work of his Plastikman project, which was then followed by the supremely but effortlessly calculated DJ mixes of the DE9 series. The Minimize to Maximize compilation, from Hawtin's own Minus label, magically and magnificently echo's the sentiments, techniques, and textures of Hawtin's latest work.

The tracks on Minimize to Maximize are at the forward boundary of techno. The forward boundary of minimalism. The forward boundary of production. The forward boundary of sound. And, even, the forward boundary of danceablity. Coolely mechanical, undeniably human. Tribal and urban. Ultimately, the music manages the impossible - it comes across as forward-thinking in a genre which is aged and suffering. The anonymous, unpretentious tic-toc, minimal man-machine grind of the music on Minimize to Maximize is quite an antidote to the modern electornic dance music mallaise. And it is so thoroughly poetic that the genre should experience its resurgence through the sub-genre that is undoubtedly it's own, adopted, "grand-daddy."