“Invasion, I like that,” Richie Hawtin laughs when the term is used to describe his upcoming ‘CNTRL: Beyond EDM’ tour of North America, his attempt to take “the more futuristic and underground side of the genre” to fans of EDM in the U.S. market alongside Loco Dice and other techno stalwarts. Last Thursday, at the ADE conference in Amsterdam, Hawtin hosted a panel discussing the concept, alongside Dice, Seth Troxler and several US promoters committed to pushing underground sounds; beforehand, though, he chatted directly with VIBE Magazine.
We posed Hawtin the question as to whether it was the right time to bring his underground techno sounds to the US. “If we can bring people into the door, and put me in the right situation to ‘do my best’ type of set,” Hawtin said. “I think I’m engaging as a performer on a visual level, and on a music and sonic level, and the kind of production and stuff I bring, I can put together a show that can be accepted and enjoyed by North Americans, and much more people than have enjoyed it so far. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be putting myself on a tour bus for 17 days,” he laughed.
When queried as to whether it was the right time to embark on the project, Hawtin was a little more pensive in his response in his response. “Let me put it like this. I don’t think we’re too late, I think we’re right on the cusp, maybe being a little too early. But this is stage one. If this goes well, there’s the West Coast, there’s middle America, there’s a lot more we can do,” he said.
“Myself and Dice and other friends are all committed to trying to draw the attention of the youth of today, while they’re connected in some way to electronic music, grabbing their attention somehow and giving them the opportunity to hear something a little different.”
If you’d like more information on the ‘CNTRL: Beyond EDM’ tour, check out its Facebook page at www.facebook.com/cntrlbeyondedm.