Techno entered the 21st century sounding lean and laser-focused. Austere, hypnotic, and relentlessly reduced, the subgenre known simply as “minimal” would define club music’s avant-garde throughout the first decade of the new millennium. But years before that, Richie Hawtin was already laying the groundwork for the style. Recorded live in his Windsor, Ontario, studio in 1995, Mixmag Records Presents Richie Hawtin – Mixmag Live!, Hawtin’s debut solo mix CD, is an hour-long snapshot of the nascent sound in which tones and textures, rather than hooks or melodies, are the star of the show. Stripping away some of the acidic psychedelia of his work as Plastikman, Hawtin’s selections here tend to zero in on bare-bones elements—crisp rimshots, ticking hi-hats, a lone synth chord—that float in empty space. In G-Man’s “Quo Vadis,” a pair of dubbed-out chords suggest ghostly echoes of Jamaica; DBX’s “Live Wire” electrifies with little more than a silvery filament of squelch. Layering, looping, and playing with panning, reverb, and delay, Hawtin’s mixing anticipates the more complex collage work he would perform on 1999’s Decks, EFX & 909 and 2001’s DE9 | Closer to the Edit. Though it’s less well-known than those two sets, Mixmag Live! is an equally essential part of the minimal canon.