Features
Playing differently: Richie Hawtin and his DJ super-team
We rounded them up at the Amsterdam Dance Event to talk tech, techno and taking performance to the next level
Paco Osuna’s working relationship with Hawtin dates back almost a decade when Paco released a handful of funk-swung grooves on Richie’s Plus 8. He’s now a firm fixture in the Minus family and an even firmer friend of Richie’s. But things could have gone differently if Paco hadn’t been so ready to embrace the times…
“I was running a record store,” he recalls, “and the day Richie created Final Scratch I knew vinyl was going to crash. Eventually I closed my store down.”
In the hands of a bitter ‘back in the day’ guy this could be fighting talk. But definitely not for Paco, who’s been a prominent figure in techno for 23 years. Instead, he continued in the spirit that founded DJ technology in the first place: move with it, or move over.
“I’m a huge lover of vinyl. But first and foremost I am a DJ,” he says. “I’ve never been happier with my set-up than I am now. Why would you say no to something you know will change the DJ world? In the studio when we’re producing the music we welcome all new developments. So why wouldn’t we do that as performers? I get sent around 30GB of promos per week. 1,000 tracks. Maybe only 100 of them are on vinyl. So you’d miss out on discovering if any of those other tracks work for you.”
His set-up reflects his discovery-driven selection, comprising three controllers, Traktor and Ableton, giving him a hands-on, live-inspired set-up. He’s not one to instantly dismiss past technology, either. Like Dice and Liebing, Paco has dusted off his old Cycloops thanks to the independence and sonic consistency of each channel on the MODEL 1. A neat pocket-sized looper from the early-2000s, Cycloops allows DJs to quickly loop the previous bar of the track playing. A cool creative tool and a godsend for random laptop crashes, they now pass hands for upwards of $300.
“I have two. I treat them like gold bars. They’re one of those special machines in DJ history, like original 909s,” explains the artist behind Barcelona’s legendary Club4 and the Mindshake label. But while he has a soft spot for classic machines it’s the future he’s much more fascinated by. “What will become of DJ technology in the future? This is the question they must ask themselves at every big music company! Who knows? What I do know is that technology is to make our lives better, increase creativity and that I will be following it.”
Paco Osuna’s working relationship with Hawtin may be a decade old, but as kindred spirits they go back to the very start of techno.
