When electronic musician and DJ Richie Hawtin played the inaugural Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 1999, the Sahara Tent was its modest stage for electronic music, years from sprawling into its current size as something that could house a starship or two.

“I remember it being very small, and kind of walking behind these small tents,” Hawtin says by video call from his studio in Berlin, Germany. “At least I think our tent was pretty damn small.

“And it was pretty rough,” he says. “Not rough as in the people, just like it was definitely a first-year festival.”

But even then, Coachella felt special, says Hawtin, 51, who returns this year for his seventh time on the Coachella lineup, six times under his own name, once as his musical alter ego Plastikman.

“I remember there being a great vibe and a lot of happiness,” Hawtin says. “And what I still get from it, why I like playing at Coachella, and have actually been inspired by it for ideas, is from day one it’s been very eclectic,” Hawtin says.

“You go there and you play, but you also hang out and you meet other artists, you hear other artists,” he says. “And you have that really important festival experience, which is going and getting introduced to new music.”

Powering up

In many ways, the rise of Coachella in pop culture mirrors the rise of electronic music in the mainstream.

Born in England, Hawtin grew up in Canada just across the border from Detroit, where he got his start as a DJ in the clubs of the city where Chicago house music met German electronic music and gave birth to the techno genre.

By 1999 and the inaugural Coachella, he’d played European festivals and clubs where electronic music had already exploded, but in the United States, Southern California was one of the few places where it had taken hold.

“What I can remember about that time is that the West Coast was always more ahead of the East Coast with these festivals,” Hawtin says. “Also for electronic raves and things like that. There were always these crazy things going on out there.

“Somehow it felt felt like they were maybe connected to the ’60s and Flower Power,” he says. “They were kind of hippie somehow, like a lot of love going around in the greatest way.”

Coachella embraced electronic music from the start. That first year also featured the influential Detroit DJs and producers Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May in the Sahara Tent, where Hawtin also performed, but also such electronic-based acts as the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Art Of Noise and Nightmares on Wax.

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“Coachella has been important to give electronic artists who want to go beyond just a typical DJ set or club experience a platform,” Hawtin says. “I kind of see Coachella leading the way to accept that kind of crossover from dark club to main stage or stage shows.”

Coachella also inspired Hawtin to dream bigger about how he might present his music in ways different from the typical DJ semi-hidden behind his gear on stage. In 2017, for a production he called Close, Hawtin says he put into practice ideas inspired by the things he saw in his previous booking there in 2013.

“I must have been walking around and seeing not as much electronic music as I expected playing on stages, and wondered why, and what it needed to be there,” he says. “I started to go down this pathway of dreaming, ‘How does a DJ be a DJ on a stage?’

“If you look at Close, it’s just me being a DJ, but it’s wrapped up in a show that leaves the DJ part as authentic as possible, but puts it on that level of kind of Vegas and lights and this and that,” Hawtin says..

“So I’ve definitely had some very important and profound shows and ideas during my Coachella experiences.”

‘Consumed’ again

Hawtin’s newest release is a reimagining of one of his classic albums — not that he’ll play it at Coachella. Hawtin says he keeps his original music out of DJ sets like the one which he’ll spin at the fest this year.

The 1998 release “Consumed,” by Hawtin’s Plastikman alter ego, is widely considered a masterpiece of minimalist techno, and as such, Hawtin considered it fixed in its place in musical history.

But then, during the pandemic, his friend and fellow electronic musician Tiga sent him a handful of demos made by Chilly Gonzalez, a musician and producer who’s worked with everyone from Daft Punk to Drake. The tracks were essentially Hawtin’s songs from “Consumed” with Gonzalez’s piano reveries floating on the surface.

” ‘Consumed’ for me, it was a closed piece,” he says. “It was a very personal, very special album. And now I have some guy adding to that album. Adding to something which I tried to reduce as much as possible. So I was really confused.”

But Tiga urged him to listen, and he knew by reputation that Gonzalez was a well-respected musician. So even though he also wasn’t sure how acoustic piano would fit over the tense electronic beats and pulsing rhythms, he listened.

Still not sure what would happen, he gave his blessings without ever meeting Gonzalez in person — it was COVID times, after all — or participating in the transformation of “Consumed” into the new “Consumed in Key.”

“I felt so connected to ‘Consumed,’ I was like, ‘OK, let’s go, let’s do this, but keep me out of it,’” Hawtin says. “It all sounded like I’m going to be a spanner in the works if I get too involved in this too soon, so let’s leave these guys alone.”

All he asked was to be allowed to mix the album when Gonzalez was finished.

“Then we’ll see how these worlds come together,” Hawtin says.

Now and then

When Coachella introduced the Yuma tent in 2013 as a dark room in which to book DJ acts, Hawtin worried it was a step back for electronic music at Coachella, which a year earlier had booked electronic acts such as Swedish House Mafia, Justice and Girl Talk for high profile slots on the Main and Outdoor stages. (Swedish House Mafia is back again this year and will now headline the final night after Kanye West dropped out of the fest.)

“In retrospect I can see that it allows people in the Coachella context to see how far electronic music has gone,” he says. “You can see the beginning, the kind of true culture of it in a dark room. Lose yourself in a strobe light or in a disco ball.

“But you can also see on the same night, the same time, electronic music elevating to a kind of full concert experience,” Hawtin says.

“I think there’s not many places where those two things happen at the same time,” says Hawtin, who this year is booked to play the Yuma tent on both Saturdays of the fest. “Maybe there is no place.”

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