END CONSTRUCTION
Party promoters Detor will be leaving their posts as programmers of Motor's VIP back room study at the end of this month. As visiting Tokyo/NY scratch master Hitoshi cut things up two Fridays ago, Detor man Derrick Ortencia detailed his and partner Jason's reason for ending their residency at the club. "We've done about all we can do with it," he said, adding that now that the Motor study is packed every Friday and crowds are familiar with resident deejay Recloose's downtempo spinning, their work at the club level is done. To their credit, Detor was instrumental in bridging the gap between the city's rave scene and nightclub crowds in their short time at Motor, turning the back room from a more often than not cheesy hangout for tanning bed frequenters into a regular Friday night stop for area promoters, deejays, producers and otherwise too-cool-for-clubs party kids. More importantly for the Detroit music scene, under Detor's tutelage became a forum for downtempo deejaying from the like Minus' Clark Warner and Planet E's Recloose.
Not ones to go out without a bang, however, Detor will host the "Trick" party Friday, Oct. 30, as their final Motor event. Scheduled in the big room are hard techno jocks Murat from New Jersey and Kenny Glasgow. "It's Devil's Night, so we're gonna beat 'em down a bit with the hard stuff," says Ortencia. Philly/Toronto hip-hop deejay Odessi will hold down Motor's side room, while Step resident Jerry Abstrakt spins experimental and drum 'n' bass in the back room. For more info on Detor's "Trick" party Oct. 30 at Motor, call 313-369-0080. A "Treat" afterparty (what else?) is also in the works, with location and details to follow at Motor the night of "Trick."
HOMME DE PLASTIQUE
"I try to make Plastikman records with an overlying atmosphere from beginning to end, but this record is more like a Plastikman compilation," says Richie Hawtin of Artifakts BC, his second Plasti-release of the year and fifth full-length this year on his new Minus label. (Minus: the No Limit of Techno?) Coming hard on the heels of the minimal, engine-knocks-in-dub opus Consumed of last May, 'Fakts fills in the blanks between the 1994 raver-electro downtempo funk of Plastikman's Musik and the altogether darker -- and quantum-leaping -- Consumed. Besides explaining the musical leap between the last two Plasti-discs, 'Fakts also offers insight into Hawtin's 1995-6 ban from entering the States due to a working paper problem. "It really made me rethink how important Detroit had been to my musical development, everything from going to see Fuzzbox at the Shelter when I was 15 to going to Royal Oak and the malls with friends or even just being able to cross the border to see my girlfriend," he says. "I just lost more and more contact." To his credit, Artifakts includes some of the most evocative and personal stuff Hawtin's ever done, from the sad "Are Friends Elektrik?" to the autumnal melancholy of "Packard," an ode to the venerated rave locale. Not uncoincidentally, both tracks sound like an exact cross between Musik's loopy melody lines and Consumed's atmospheric gravity. Tracks are also included from what was to be Musik's follow-up, Klinik, a call-back to the raw, just-say-yes spirit of 1993's Sheet One, and a project that was put on hold after Hawtin was banned from the US. If all this is starting to sound like 'Fakts is a clever excuse to get the names of his back catalog in print, and, better still, as a way to back new listeners into the at times frustrating minimalism of Consumed by giving that record's out-of-nowhere (literally) abstraction some personal context from Hawtin's history, well, Homme de Plastique ain't only the busiest man in techno, he's also the smartest. Artifakts is out Nov. 2 on Minus/Novamute.
