Magda

Rooted in Detroit yet now calling Berlin home, Magda works as a minimal techno DJ and producer with close ties to Richie Hawtin and the M_nus collective. She entered the world as Magdalena Chojnacka in Zywiec, Poland, and at the age of nine relocated with her family to the United States, where they first landed in Texas. In 1986 the household shifted again, this time to Detroit and specifically the Polish neighborhood of Hamtramck inside the larger city. Her earliest musical passions centered on guitar-driven alternative rock acts such as New Order and My Bloody Valentine, yet around 1994 attendance at Hawtin’s Spastik event inside the historic Packard Plant complex drew her deeply into Detroit’s renowned techno community. She began playing records at roughly that moment, and by 1996 she was performing publicly as a DJ, soon becoming part of Detroit’s Women on Wax collective. Over those years her sound progressed from acid techno and electro through house and ultimately into minimal techno, a shift that coincided with her growing connection to Hawtin, who granted her a weekly residency at his Windsor venue 13 Below in the late 1990s.

Her association with Hawtin deepened further when she started opening his DJ sets; one notable example occurred on New Year’s Eve 1999 at the Motor club in Hamtramck. As the Detroit techno scene faltered at the turn of the century amid law-enforcement pressures and the surge of trance, Magda departed for New York City, where she remained only a year before settling in Berlin during 2003. Hawtin soon joined her there, effectively transferring the M_nus operation from the Detroit-Windsor area to the German capital, whose larger and more open market for minimal techno proved advantageous. By the mid-2000s, already an established international DJ, she began issuing her own productions, starting with the Stop 12-inch EP on M_nus in 2005. That same year her track “The Black Room” appeared on the M_nus various-artists compilation Minimize to Maximize. In 2006 she released the full-length DJ mix She’s a Dancing Machine on M_nus, while “Staring Contest” surfaced on min2MAX and “Black Leather Wonder” was included on the Spaceships & Pings various-artists 12-inch EP issued by Items & Things, the label she co-founded alongside M_nus associates Troy Pierce and Marc Houle. Additional productions followed at a measured pace, among them “48 Hour Crack in Your Bass,” which was featured on the M_nus various-artists collection Nothing Much (A Best of Minus) + Something More.