MAGDA with ADAM MARSHALL , TASK at Project (126 Sherbourne), Friday (November 19). $15. terra@minimal.ca.
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Magda is a bit of an anomaly in techno – not only is she a woman in the male-dominated field, she’s also one of the only new personalities in the genre to make a name for herself on an international level as a DJ before having any reputation as a producer. “Most of it probably had to do with Richie Hawtin pushing me, taking me on tour with him,” Magda confesses from a tour stop in L.A.
“We met through friends when I was living in Detroit. He gave me a small residency at his club and then asked me to open for him at his New Year’s Eve party in 1999. Since then, I’ve opened for him on a few tours.”
Even before her association with Hawtin, Magda travelled in well-respected techno circles. She was initially coaxed into DJing by Dan Bell and Claude Young and later joined the Women On Wax collective, throwing parties with Kenny Dixon Jr. and Theo Parrish.
She’s an eclectic DJ, but still rooted in minimal techno, just with a bit more focus on funk and melody.
Born in Poland, Magda’s family first moved to Texas, but she later ended up in Detroit, where she discovered that quirky machine soul of techno in the warehouses around her home. After establishing herself as an emerging DJ in Detroit by the late 90s, she moved to New York for a while, but for the past year and a half has lived in Berlin.
“I was so frustrated with not being able to do anything with this music in North America. It’s hard to get the support for the weird and quirky. If I didn’t live in Berlin, I wouldn’t be able to play most of the gigs I’m getting now. It’s more free, not as constrained by rules as it is in New York, with all their smoking, drinking and dancing laws.”
Magda has started to get some notice as a producer, working mainly as part of Run Stop Restore. Think quirky melodic techno, stripped down enough to be DJ-friendly, but warm and round rather than hard and cold.
The project started out with just Windsor-based Mark Houle, but was later joined by Magda and Troy Pierce and kept the name.
She’s also working on a mix CD of the Minus back catalogue, Hawtin’s acclaimed label, choosing to chop up and rework the tracks using Ableton Live (a real-time loop sequencing program) and effects rather than the standard turntables and mixer.
No stranger to new technology, Magda was one of the first to use the Final Scratch interface, a device that allows DJs to control song files on their laptop using a standard turntable and a special record pressed with code.
“When you’re playing in new places, you never know what to expect. This way you can bring everything and play for however long you want. Right now I have about 3,500 tracks on my hard drive. I had a ton of problems when the Windows version first came out, but in the end it was worth it.”
