Richie Hawtin - From My Mind to Yours

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The title of Plus 8 Records' 25th anniversary release—which is also Richie Hawtin's first official studio album for over a decade—From My Mind to Yours, directly mirrors a compilation put out by the label in 1991-2, From Our Minds to Yours. That symmetry forms a tidy back to the label's origins, and it also serves as the crowning moment of this uncharacteristically nostalgic chapter of Richie Hawtin's career. Thus far, Hawtin has cultivated a reputation as techno's future fetishist, most literally through Minus, the heavily stylized record label that provided minimal techno with one of its key aesthetics during its mid-2000s heyday: subtractively austere, steely and clinical.

The video interview that accompanied the surprise release of From My Mind to Yours in December found Hawtin in a completely different place. He was positively twinkly-eyed with nostalgia, as he talked of "going back to basics." He credits vintage string sounds and production tricks, while speaking of stripping racks of gear back to the essentials in a Berlin studio that, by chance, replicates the dimensions (and spatial sweet spot) of a former production space from his formative years in Canada. In the weeks leading up to the final reveal of From My Mind to Yours, Plus 8 pressed up a series of album teasers; it was widely speculated that Hawtin, an occasional critic of the "pain in the ass" vinyl format, was behind the anonymous, white-label productions. In the midst of this campaign, he revived his 1990s rave night, Jak, for a one-off reunion party in Detroit, and made arrangements to pull the plug on the Ibiza superclub residency of his popular club night, ENTER.

From My Mind to Yours similarly hints towards some gratifying full-circle moments. "Them," under the F.U.S.E moniker, unfolds with slow-reveal hypnotism, and works as a faithful tribute to the classic blueprint of Midwest techno. Album opener "No Way Back" draws together various strands of Hawtin's production personalities, casting a crystalline modern sheen over a thickened kick drum and twisting 303 line. Yet the album's genuinely compelling moments are scattered out over spotless plains of DJ-tool functionality, mechanically loopy acid, and towering-but-harmless walls of precise techno sound design.

The most Hawtin-esque production tropes since the inception of Plus 8 (and Minus) reappear here, but with neither the vigour needed to push his futurist agenda, nor the dynamic context of his rich back catalog."Stretching" requires a vivid imagination to find an appeal beyond its minimalist bare bones, and Circuit Breaker's only appearance—the curiously unmoving "Systematic"—doesn't begin to approach the gruffness of that alias' industrial past. The clutch of tracks that fall under the 80XX alias play directly to the critical cliches that Hawtin is often accused of creating. Plastikman, the most beloved of Hawtin's identities, fares the best across the two-volume album. His signature hyper drums appear on the bold "Purrkusiv," and its visceral power is undeniable; follow-up track  "Gymnastiks" deploys its sleazy bassline and wispy drum echoes to a satisfying yin-yang effect.

Hawtin's '90s techno hero status was cemented with landmark classics like "Spastik" and "Elektrostatik," which in turn assured a spot for Plus 8 in the annals of techno history. The label's only other recent release arrived unannounced last year: an anonymous record that was eventually revealed to be produced by electro house megastar and Twitter hothead Deadmau5. This was an unpopular revelation in certain quarters, but it worked both as a gossip-worthy moment and an effective jolt of renewal for the label's run-up to its 2015 anniversary; the tracks's production standards signalled a revived richness of sound that the label lacked in its latter years. At moments, From My Mind to Yours captures some of that same texture and immediacy, but the spontaneity and looseness that Hawtin speaks of so passionately have been diluted through the process of translation. Rather than feeling like the beginnings of a new phase, From My Mind To Yours presents a version of a fertile past that isn't working toward the benefit of the present.