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Album Reviews
Album Review: Plastikman – Arkives 1993-2010 (Minus)
By Marc Samuels | Published on Tuesday 7 December 2010
Well, if you’re going to release a career retrospective, you might as well do it properly. Why stop at one, or even a paltry two CDs? Plastikman, aka Canada’s Richie Hawtin, has decided that this limited edition box set should include not just the six albums released under his Plastikman guise, but also five – five! – CDs full of rarities, remixes and unreleased material.
Sadly – or possibly thankfully, depending on how you look at things and whether you enjoy reading verbose reviews or not – the promo is merely a 150 minute, two CD greatest hits type affair, which would probably work quite well in its own right, actually.
Anyway, on to the music then, and if you had to describe Plastikman’s in one word, that word would be ‘acid’. The best tracks here (see ‘Plastique’, ‘Plasticene’ and ‘Spastik’), the type Hawtin made his name with, are generally ten minute long brutally minimal slabs of acid wherein not much happens aside from foreboding bass, crunching beats and the infamous Roland 303, insistently squelching its psychedelic patterns to nefarious effect. These tracks probably sounded amazing in the 90s, especially if chemicals were involved. But they sound pretty good now too, even without the drugs. Hawtin can do melodic techno, too – witness ‘Dimension Intrusion’, his album by FUSE – or the undulating ‘Are Friends Electrik’ here.
You could complain that, at times he’s too minimal for his own good, but when he gets the balance of beats, mood and melody right, it makes for heady listening. It’s available to pre-order now from www.plastikman.com/arkives/. MS
