In honor of the renowned Steve Reich, IRCAM’s Électro Odyssée Invites Richie Hawtin to perform live under his F.U.S.E. moniker.

IRCAM (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) Parisian concert season Electro-Odyssée this year invites world-renowned electronic musician Richie Hawtin to perform under his F.U.S.E. moniker, for only the second time in his 30-year plus history. The performance will feature entirely new original ambient and improvised material.

Now occupying not only a uniquely iconic position and exploratory route to electronic music composition but an exciting re-evaluation of what a modern composer can be the pioneering electronic musician will explore techno’s early relationship with minimalist pioneer Steve Reich.

Richie Hawtin states: “The FUSE Live project is an exploration into live ambient repetitions, creating soundscapes that are both hypnotic and consuming. In the tradition of Steve Reich, the performance uses a reduced set of sounds and parameters, focusing on varying loop points for progressions and movement. The shows unfold in real-time, created for the moment, while within the moment”

Combining an international performance festival with the multidisciplinary academy anchored in the original concept of pairing scientists and artists together; IRCAM is one of the world’s largest public research centers dedicated to both musical expression and scientific research.

Electro-Odyssée exists to broaden the expressive power of electronic music. A sonic odyssey for contemporary and experimental music. In the unique Parisian concert location of IRCAM artistic sensibilities collide with scientific and technological innovation around its three principal activities — creation, research, transmission.

Long called “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker) and “among the great composers of the century” (The New York Times), Steve Reich’s most groundbreaking and definitive works rose through the 1960’s and 1970’s suggestively laying the foundational inspiration for a new electronic genre movement in Detroit in the early 1990’s.

Was minimal techno inspired by Steve Reich?

Steve Reich and Richie Hawtin’s parallel paths are noteworthy groundbreaking and precise on both technical and artistic levels, each bold masterful ambassadors for their music’s forward-looking potential, Regardless of the technology used; Richie Hawtin’s visionary process of probing the ways we experience the boundaries of electronic music remains consistent – pushing musical eco-systems, emerging technologies, and artistic performances that shift the center of composition away from complexity unlocking a new language of brutal simplicity.

British-born, Canadian-raised, Richie Hawtin rose to fame in the emergence and boom of techno music in the early 1990s, cutting his teeth in the scene’s Detroit clubs and warehouse parties, having been instrumental in the emergence of minimal techno, and his own recordings and iconic albums as Plastikman and F.U.S.E. In 2023, he marks thirty years since his debut album as Plastikman (‘Sheet One’) was released on Mute Records and “changed the landscape of electronic music forever”. It was also the same year, 1993, that the experimental electronic F.U.S.E. album ‘Dimension Intrusion’ was released on pioneering electronic label Warp Records.