Credit: Found On Internet

 Widely recognised as the don of minimal techno, back in the early Nineties everyone assumed pioneering producer Richie Hawtin was from Detroit. It was a natural mistake, since he was a warehouse party regular in the motor city and frequently appeared on the bill next to Detroit techno gods such as Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May.

In fact the blond haired Hawtin has dual UK citizenship, was raised in Windsor, Canada and only escaped to Detroit to get frequent techno fixes. From here he moved to New York, until he refocused on Europe and eventually settled in Germany.

Hawtin has since become a figure head for Berlin’s new confidence as the capital of all things electronic and it‘s now hard to imagine him living anywhere else.

So, as the sporting world prepares to converge on Germany for the World Cup, we spoke to Richie about why the city has become so attractive for musician - and particularly electronic musicians, with a passion for minimal arrangements and bass end bleeps.

“I could make a long list of reasons for why I moved to Berlin,” says Richie, as we perch drinking iced water on the spotless settee in his equally spotless, minimally decorated flat in Prenzlauer Berg - which once literally backed onto the Berlin Wall. “One is I was spending so much time in the air flying across the Atlantic, which is great for my frequent flyer points, but I needed more time to myself to create.

“I’d spent so long in Detroit and Windsor growing up that I felt I needed a change. I spent a year in New York, which was amazing, but I didn’t see a future for me or electronic music in New York.

“I wanted to go somewhere that would challenge, that had a developing scene that was open to artistic ideas - not only mine but other peoples, and also had a standard of living that welcomed artists.

“You think about Paris and New York and all the other artistic centres of the modern of Twentieth Century world and none of them are that welcoming to new artists. It’s quite hard for you to live in the heart of the city you find inspiring unless you’re making a lot of money.