Derrick May, Richie Hawtin, and Aphex Twin - Power of 3

Aphex Twins: Modern day classical music, a bloke messing around with electronics in the seclusion of the Cornish countryside, a genius, a man with ideas above his station so off his trolley he drives his own personal tank around the land surrounding Twin Towers. Take your pick, really. Richard D James ( aka Aphex Twin ) early in his career produced a bunch of Techno ( check out the superlative "Didgeridoo" ) as well as a bunch of what can only be classified as 'ambient' music. Now mention ambient and people will spring up 'A-Ha! Brian Eno!' and the conversation surrounding the relative merits or otherwise of Aphex Twin will get lost in a tribute to the balding professor of rock music that is Brian Eno. Fact is this music owes absolutely nothing to the music of Brian Eno. Richard D James as I mentioned earlier was very much in seclusion growing up in the Cornish countryside. Whilst that doesn't mean it's impossible he listened to Brian Eno non-stop through his childhood, it does added to the fact the music of Brian Eno has NEVER been mentioned by Richard himself render any attempts to marginalise or lessen the impact of the very singular music of the Aphex Twin less of an issue altogether. A complete misunderstanding in fact. Ok, so ambient wasn't invented by the Aphex Twin. But ambient is only the half of it, anyway. A certain something is happening here. Ambient is a stripping away of everything to leave the bare essentials, often a single melody line with 'atmospheric' new age sound effects over the top. That isn't at all what is happening here. Lets take opener "Xtal" as an example. Little electronic shuffling cymbal sounds, a melody line, a soft bass beat - sampled heavenly female 'da da, do da' ethereal vocal sounds. The main melody line continues, a second appears underneath. In effect you get two ambient songs layered over the top of one another. Other melody lines appear. Second song "Tha" stretches a single beat and rhythm over nine minutes and layers variations over that beat. "Pulsewidth" sounds truly otherworldly, a sound that could only have been achieved by the Aphex Twin. Why? He build all of his own instrumentation. There is little technological or 'cold' sound here as a result. "Pulsewidth" in particular sounds very human, very analogue, and not at all 'digital'.

Derrick May, also known as Mayday and Rhythim is Rhythim, is an electronic musician from Detroit, Michigan U.S.. He was born in Detroit in 1963 and began to explore electronic music early in his life. Along with his Belleville, Michigan high school friends Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson, commonly known as the Belleville Three, May is credited with developing the futuristic variation on house music that would be dubbed "techno" by Atkins.

May's career started in 1987 with the release of a record called "Nude Photo", which helped kickstart the Detroit techno music scene. A year later he was following it with what was to become one of house music's classic anthems, the seminal "Strings of Life".

In the 90s May also played at many UK raves for the likes of Obsession.

May has also created his own record label Transmat which apart from his own work, has released records by well known techno and house artists like Carl Craig (as Psyche), Suburban Knight, Octave One, K-Alexi Shelby and Joey Beltram.

May has not released any new music since 1993, but has continued his career as a DJ, continuing to perform regularly in Europe and Asia. In 2003, he was granted control of Detroit's popular annual electronic music festival. He named his event Movement, replacing the Detroit Electronic Music Festival along the city's riverfront.

Richie Hawtin (born June 4, 1970, Banbury, Oxfordshire, England) is a Canadian electronic musician and internationally-touring DJ who was an influential part of Detroit techno's second wave of artists in the early 1990s. Hawtin is most known for his haunting, minimal works under the alias Plastikman, a moniker he continued to use into the mid-2000s. He is also known for DJing intelligent, minimal techno sets making use of high-tech electronics such as drum machines and digital mixing equipment. With fellow second-waver John Acquaviva he founded and still runs the Plus 8 record label in May 1990, and in 1998 he launched M_nus (graphically represented with a boxed underscore in place of the "i"), a label primarily for his own projects.

Hawtin has also recorded music under the aliases F.U.S.E, Concept 1, Circuit Breaker, The Hard Brothers, Hard Trax, Jack Master, and UP!. He also recorded and performed, in combination with other artists, under group names such as 0733, Cybersonik, Final Exposure, Spawn, and States Of Mind. A collaboration by Richie with Pete Namlook produced the From Within series of albums.

Although he was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire in England, Richie Hawtin spent most of his life in LaSalle, Ontario, which is a suburb of Windsor, Ontario. Richie attended Sandwich Secondary High School in LaSalle. He spent part of 2002 and 2003 living in New York City, and has since moved to Berlin, Germany. He has one brother, Matthew, who is a visual artist and ambient music DJ.

Prior to about 1993, Richie Hawtin was billed for DJ appearances under the name Richie Rich, a name also used by an American hip hop music DJ who was a member of 3rd Bass, and also a UK house music DJ who was actively producing remixes around the same time.

Vintage sets!!!!

Derrick May, Richie Hawtin, and Aphex Twin - Live @ Fuse Unknow year

Aphex Twin - Live at Avalon, Boston 08-09-97