Bloc, widely regarded as the most cutting edge of the electronic music festivals, have revealed a new wave of additions to the line up, including Techno heavy-weight Richie Hawtin, Avant Garde composer Steve Reich, and slightly off-kilter to the rest if the line up, rap icon Snoop Dogg.
It’s been a long time coming, but finally, high emperor of techno Richie Hawtin is playing at Bloc. A tireless ambassador for techno music’s forward-looking potential and one of the genre’s few DJs who can truly take control of vast crowds and put them under his spell, Hawtin’s ascent began a few years after the first wave of Detroit techno artists blew his mind at the legendary Music Institute. He quickly set up his own outpost for the work of fellow techno acolytes including Dan Bell, Kenny Larkin and Speedy J, Plus 8, before transforming the scene’s direction with his timeless Plastikman productions. Austere, tripped-out, and unlike any dance music around, Plastikman heralded a new minimalist approach that remains central to techno and its innumerable related subgenres to this day.
Renowned for his constant search for something ‘new’, his Minus label has been a world-beating springboard for artists like Magda, Troy Pierce, and many more, working a close knit mentality into its aesthetic to create an evolving but distinctive ‘Minus’ sound along the way. As a DJ, his scope is perhaps broader but equally singular, forensically deconstructing tracks into component parts and rebuilding them for the one-off experience that is a Richie Hawtin DJ set.
There are few living composers more influential on modern electronic music than Steve Reich. Ostensibly from a modern classical background, but with a reach that spreads from the most avant-garde experiemental music to straight up pop, his work from the 1960s onwards essentially mapped-out the entire spectrum of “minimalist” music while inspiring subgenres as divergent as techno and hip-hop. From early tape loop compositions to the singular ensemble works of the 1970s and the dense orchestral and voice compositions of the 1980s and ’90s, Reich has amassed a body of work both incredibly diverse and instantly recognizable, twisting the very ideas of what constitutes ‘music’ into wild and uncharted forms. His work has had an impact on everyone from Kraftwerk to Jeff Mills to the latest wave of minimalist dubsteppers, all of whom have taken Reich’s principles of rewiring existing sound sources in unimaginable new ways and developed their own inspired visions as a result. A towering titan of musical exploration, 2012 marks the composer’s 75th birthday, where Reich and the Bang On a Can All Stars perform an exclusive UK festival show at Bloc.
And finally, global superstar, cultural phenomenon and raps most charismatic frontman Snoop Dogg is welcomed to the Bloc family. We must admit, we thought Snoop was a bit of a bizarre choice for Bloc when you look at the rest of the line-up, so its going to be interesting to see what the mega star plans to bring to the table, his exclusive Bloc show comes ahead of his latest album, ‘Reincarnated’.
With an exciting new venue space, and some of the most interesting names in electronic music already on the bill, this looks set to be the most exciting Bloc yet.
http://www.blocweekend.com/
