Richie Hawtin

Richie Hawtin, born 1970 in Banbury, England, moved at age nine to LaSalle, Ontario, near the Detroit border, where proximity to the city's clubs and radio pulled him into its second wave of techno in the early 1990s. In 1990 he and John Acquaviva founded Plus 8 Records, named after a turntable's pitch control, releasing raw, stripped-down Windsor-Detroit techno. In 1993 he adopted the Plastikman alias for the single "Spastik" and the album Sheet One, work that helped define minimal techno's austere, hypnotic vocabulary. He launched M-nus Records in 1998 to extend that minimalist direction, and later founded the technology company PLAYdifferently, releasing the MODEL 1 mixer in 2016.