R U OK

Kevin McHugh — Ambivalent — is a New York producer who became one of the Berghain regulars during the years Hawtin was running M_nus from Berlin. That trajectory is one of the defining stories of mid-2000s techno: American producers arriving in Berlin, playing the rooms that Detroit techno had built its European reputation on, and finding a home in a scene that had always understood itself as a transatlantic conversation.

R U OK is from that moment. The M_nus sound by 2007 had a particular dryness — tracks assembled like arguments rather than experiences, each element present because it earned its place. Hawtin’s own description of the label’s direction by then was “conceptualist minimalism,” which could be a criticism if you were inclined to read it as cold. Listening now, it sounds like precision. The record asks R U OK in the title and then declines to answer.