The Plastikman show isn't thought of in just one day

It might be the wet dream of many to take a dive behind Richie Hawtins scenes. But during ADE it became possible for a complete room filled with people. The synthetic human gave an inside look on how the current Plastikman liveshow came to exist. With home video’s, snapshots and scribbling on Hilton Hotel paper the story behind the show comes alive.

Not only mister Hawtin is telling about the show, but also Jarrett Smith from Derivative was there to tell about how the visuals of the show are one cohesive part with the music. Richie takes us back to the beginning of the idea. “The vision was to create a show that was an audiovisual experience made by one person on stage. I started deejaying back in 87 and in the early nineties I started to plat on a lot of parties, on which I was for the music. And all I was seeing were those cheesy rave visuals. I’d love to have only one strobe, and the rest of the room could be completely dark. Most of the times there was no relation with the visual guy, so I was only fighting with him. At the end of some of the parties I threw there was this weird old guy waiting, to talk about live visuals. He kept badgering me. And that was Greg Hermanovic from Side Effects.”

Greg used to have a big purple box which was back in the day one of the most advanced computer systems available. Usually being used for 3D animation, like for Jurrasic Park, he’d take the Big Purple Box to raves to experiment with visuals. “He was around all the time, and at first I was not open to it. But in the end I started Minus, and we talked about doing a show in Montreal. The crowd expected me to dance music, but I was doing weird loops with red dots flashing behind my head. They’d stood there and scratch their heads. Back in 98 it was too much technology, too expensive.” Jarrett adds “I wanted audio and video to be the same system, and I didn’t want to fiddle with knobs.”

Mind you, these things were happening somewhat 15 till 12 years ago. That’s a long time. Richie continues about the project. When I moved to Berlin, I got friendly with Gerhard from Ableton. In the mean time the guys from Side Effects where doing visuals, and I was doing music. Steffen from Tme Warp was begging to do a Plastikman show. In a cave in Austria. He presented this  low res led thing, while I was in that high res mode, so I refused. Later I was asked by Mutek to do something special, on the 4th of June. Which also happens to be my birthday. Combined with the fact Mutek takes place in Canada I wanted to make something really special out of it. Anyway, the Side Effect guys had to figure out how to get their program working together with Ableton, what didn’t support MIDI back then. It actually was the beginning with MIDI for Ableton. They had less than 6 months to get two programs working together.”

Then follows a short documentary on how al the material and the controls have been build, put together and tested. Actually his dad made the control panels. “He’s pretty handy with that kind of stuff”. The first try-out for the show was in front of 3000 people. “I wasn’t yet ready for whole new system, it was a big lesson. It was like having a 747 but no license to fly it. Jarrett and I were disappointed and done with it.” Jarrett adds “We thought it was retarded. I ended up working on theme park attractions.” But by now we now the ending. There is a Plastikman Liveshow in existence. Richie: “While they were doing work on themeparks, I started deejaying again. Then I hooked up with Ali Demerol. I put the idea of controlling visuals aside and Contakt started out of that. Ali was controlling the show, me and Magda and others controlling the music. We figured out how it worked. After the last Contakt show, we didn’t knew were to go. I had an 8 week break, Etienne de Crecy was doing a cube liveshow, it was visually cool. When we looked at the visual computers we noticed that there was no spontaneity. It was a great show, but something missing. That’s when I met again with Jarrett. We had to come up with a new content. It was me, standing inside a LED curtain. To figure out how thinks would work, we rented the hall where Time Warp is being held, for 25.000 euro to set up the system. After seeing it we thought it could be a good idea.” We all know the result. The show exists, and works flawless, ever changing, and with Richie controlling absolutely everything.

And by now we’re getting in the really difficult technical part of the project. All we can say is  “you should’ve been there!”

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