Titan of techno
Canadian Richie Hawtin was king of all DJs in 2006
Anthony Augustine


M_nus Retrospective—m-nus.com/mc2006 — Few artists epitomize the hard-rockin’, jet-setting DJ lifestyle better than Windsor’s Richie Hawtin. From his early days crossing the Detroit River to soak up the first wave of techno in Detroit, Hawtin has been at the forefront of electronic music culture in North America. While the DJ has always been on the cutting edge, 2006 has to been seen as a high-water mark for him. His relocation to Berlin thrust him back into the heart of techno and reinvigorated his career. His label, M_nus, set the tone for 2006 with a slew of machine-driven post-rave gems that made it into nearly every DJ’s hard drive or record box. Hawtin also ran two extensive Min2Max bus tours with the M_nus crew (one in North America, one in Europe), composed music for the opening ceremony of the Olympics, played over 100 gigs (including headlining slots at Mutek in Montreal, Sonar in Barcelona and Movement in Detroit), and oversaw M_nus’ busiest release schedule to date. He also found time to hold down a number of high-profile residencies, including one on the legendary party island Ibiza. Known for his ability to kick it with the best of them, Hawtin also ended up on YouTube with buddy Sven Vath as a result of their antics at one infamous afterparty in Rome. While you might not get to tour Colombia, play to 20,000 screaming Japanese fans at the Wire festival or eat at El Bulli (Google it), you can live vicariously through Canada’s No. 1 electronic export in this retrospective diary and photo journal from 2006.

Ad Generator—www.theadgenerator.org — In his recent show at the Semai Gallery, Winnipeg’s Paul Butler challenged the art establishment with simple displays that consisted of a single piece of text declaring “power to the artist.” While this is a slight departure from his collage work, Butler has always examined the power of text. In a similar vein, master’s student Alexis Lloyd has developed an online project that remixes corporate ad slogans and, using images scraped from Flickr, creates ads on-the-fly to “show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless, in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.” This would have been a great installation at the recent Unlearn show at Plug-In ICA.

iLike— www.ilike.com — You might not need another social-networking site that plugs into iTunes to help you sift through the endless stream of digital music, but iLike is worth checking out. Not only does it help you share your music with friends and get music recommendations directly in iTunes, but it also helps you compare your tastes with people in your network. With sites such as Pandora and Last FM and plug-ins such as The Filter already having an established user base, it’s hard to tell if iLike will take off.

Anthony Augustine is a freelance music, technology and pop culture writer. He can be heard every Tuesday morning at 9:00am on Hot 103 discussing the web. Got a site you think he should see? E-mail him at anthony.alloneword@gmail.com.