Musik (2024 Remastered)

Acid’s undulating tones dictate the album’s shape and flow. In “Outbak,” they take the form of a sweeping, laser-like beam, anticipating the darkened dronescapes of 1998’s Consumed, the pinnacle of Hawtin’s brand of minimalism. In the conga-driven “Ethnik”—the rare Plastikman track to gesture at a universe beyond its own event horizon—they are braided together to resemble flutes. Only in “Marbles” does the 303 assume acid’s more conventionally gravelly form, slipping into a pugilistic syncopated pattern that foreshadows the aggression that big-beat acts like the Chemical Brothers would harness just a few years down the line. In Hawtin’s hands, though, even the most buzzsaw tones remain fundamentally hypnotic, wreathed in reverb and melancholy; the filters’ long, gradual arcs impose a glacial pace that muffles the impact of the jabbing bass riffs.

The album’s highlight is the 13-minute epic “Plastique,” in which a pair of contrapuntal acid lines shimmer, wraithlike, in the middle distance; the background is streaked with the lamentations of what might be sickly birds. Part of what makes the 303 sound so otherworldly is its portamento, or glide, setting, and here, Hawtin uses it to escape the 12-tone scale: Sliding from note to note, his riffs often seem to land just shy of a whole or half tone, lending his melodies a weird microtonal cast. In contrast to the slipperiness of his 303s, the drums seem all the more rigid: The hi-hats dance like chef’s knives; kicks and snares dangle like the weights on an old-school doctor’s scale; the handclaps might be bear traps snapping shut.

Many of the album’s chief innovations, in fact, are rhythmic. That’s thanks largely to Hawtin’s choice of tempos. Only “FUK,” a bare-knuckled percussive workout, “Goo,” and the monotone “Marbles” are pitched at a conventional dancefloor pace; the rest of the album’s tracks hang in an elastic interzone, between 95 and 110 BPM, that Hawtin enlivens with bursts of triplets and 32nd-note fills. The drums—mostly Roland TR-909, a machine distinguished by its fat, rich tones—strut and bounce; rock-steady riffs explode into fractals. On more insistent tracks, like “Kriket,” rhythmic phrases lock together in complex call-and-response patterns, spinning like one of M.C. Escher’s staircases. On slinkier cuts, like “Plastique,” the overall effect is a kind of gracefully meticulous swagger, at once flamboyant, carefree, and clinically precise.

Frustrated that his debut long player, F.U.S.E.’s Dimension Intrusion, was an anthology of previously released tracks, Hawtin was determined that Sheet One, his first Plastikman album, would feel like a proper full-length, and with Musik, he doubled down on that aim, complete with a long, scene-setting introduction and emotional denouement, the poignant “Lasttrak.” While some of the album’s songs make spellbinding standalone cuts, others—like the two-minute interstitial “Goo,” or the droning “Outbak”—feel insubstantial on their own. Together, though, they contribute to a remarkably focused vision. (Only “Ethnik” breaks the mood.) Hawtin loved both the madness of the most unhinged rave and the sensorial clarity that came with the most solitary introspection. On Musik, he poured the former into the latter, fusing techno’s adrenaline rush with ambient’s heightened state of perception, setting a new course for generations of psychedelic travelers to follow.

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