I just saw the 1970 movie "Performance", in which Mick Jagger stars as an aging rock star, back in the day when a 30-year old was considered to be an aging rock star. And forgive me if I'm years behind the ball on this one, but with his pouty look, long black hair, and dark eye makeup, Brian Molko of Placebo looks EXACTLY like Mick does in this movie. The ressemblance is so close that it's scary. As for the movie itself, "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" trod similar ground and was far more cleverly written, and the accents were just as difficult to understand.

Follow-ups:

The third album will settle the following question once and for all: are Drugstore one of the most talented bands in Britain, or was their debut album merely one of the biggest flukes in the history of recorded music?? (From July 27, 2000)

I recently bought the bullet and paid $36.99 (-$24.99 using a free CD from my HMV club card) for Drugstore's newest, "Songs for the Jetset". And after listening to it ... of course, the choice is never as black and white like I overdramatised last July. The opening double-shot of "Baby Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Song For the Lonely" are as good as anything they've done, the kind of stuff that I'd call "seminal" if I didn't hate that word and couldn't describe it better as a tenderized "I Know I Could". The overproduction that marred the last album is absent, with a bare, semi-acoustic lo-fi folky mood taking it's place. Which, in a way, presents a new problem: despite solid tunes top-to-bottom, the album has a homogeneous feel with little of the noise blasts that made "Drugstore" so engaging. But looking at the set lists from their February/March UK tour, I'm salivating all over this keyboard -- PLEASE, somebody give them a North American record deal so they can tour here.

If Travis and Coldplay are to survive long-term, then they MUST quit sounding less like 1995 Radiohead and more like something, anything, else. However, advance press regarding the new Travis album do not suggest that this is the case. (January 4, 2001)

That didn't stop me from buying "The Man Who" when I woke up one morning and realised that "Driftwood" is an absolutely brilliant song. After failing to find a used copy, I finally reneged and paid for it at HMV, mere hours before the release of the next Travis album (somehow that seemed to matter at the time). And sure enough, the new album is widely purported to sound exactly like "The Man Who", except with less hummable tunes, but those opinions will surely change because it always takes a while to get into the tunes on a pop album, nobody thought TMW was a classic at the time, but a couple of million sales and humungous group singalongs at outdoor festivals have their ways of tickling the insides.

And when I saw the cover of the new Jessica Simpson album, looking out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was Britney. If Jessica wants anyone to believe that she's the anti-Britney, i.e. the chaste and tame Christian girl next door alternative to Britney's now famous Lolita image, then she might want to ditch the provocative poses and see-through tops.

(posted before, but written after, the June 3 entry). Yesterday, we discovered that the house fans are driving MUTEK. Oh, the techno fans are there, dancing quietly or sitting in a corner talking about software, but it's the house fans that are raising the roof on the dance floor. So what, you say? It's a techno festival, so techno remains the soul of the machine, but if the house music fans are the the most vocal and the most visible, then MUTEK's reputation lies in its ties to the house music community. I know that the house v. techno battle is a matter of life and death for some people (i.e. the purists) but I am not one of them. I like house. I like it a lot. So even if I'm unconcerned about this issue on a personal aesthetic basis, on a philosophical basis, I've got a bit of a problem with a techno festival relying on house music fans to bring home the bacon.

In the spirit of happy hour, I make myself comfortable, and get to work writing about Saturday night in a notebook. SAT's not packed yet, but it poured rain in Montreal during the afternoon, so give people some time. Sure enough, the toddlers were there, dancing to Jeremy P. Caulfield by afternoon's end. But first, it's a set of vicious techno by Jacob Fairley. But the best was still to come, in the form of Matt and Mark Thibedeau rocking the place into oblivion with a spectacular set of their deep, cinematic and yet proudly minimal house. I find myself feeling quite sorry for them, because the cramped front portion of SAT doesn't leave much space for dancing, and regardless, the happy hour setting isn't conducive to it. If they had played in the main room during any of the night events, there's little doubt in my mind that they would have stolen this festival by inducing hyper-Philippe Cam levels of madness among the house-hungry denizens. Following up, Jeremy P. Caulfield's performance is just beats to me, with his final track, a funk monster with impromptu rude vocals by an audience member, standing out as by far the most memorable moment.

Later on, I expected a more subdued evening, assuming that the Monday morning early risers would open up some space on the dancefloor. Instead, the opposite was true: after an hour of blippy dub which could have easily passed as an all-Pole set, SAT is jam packed tighter than at any other time of the weekend. The place is hot (literally) with the escalating body heat of hundreds of people, affixed in anticipation of Herbert's live performance, and hot (figuratively) for the exact same reason. Performing with a live vocalist and pianist, the house v. techno dilemma flies straight out the window and impales the cashier at the donut shop across the street, because Matthew Herbert proves, as if he had to, that he is the most soulful white man on the planet. His beats are filled with pops, whirs and fidgety fingertapping rhythms (a fine bit of continuity from the music that played before his set) and it's not until the third song that he goes truly nuts on the sampler, breaking bottles and CDs, smashing and tapping microphones, all of which is lumped in to the rich stew of soul, techno-geekery and gorgeous jazz piano solos. Not to mention the sheer physical image of him flailing away, clacking and banging for the sake of live performance, which is why Herbert is the one and only true action star of house. Even after two encores, the place is eating him up with a spoon to the point of scraping the gooey bits from the bottom of the saucepan with said spoon and then licking the metal spotless. After that, I feel for Dimbiman, because the crowd is buzzing over Herbert's masterful set and it takes a good twenty minutes before people really start getting into his show, me included. That is, once the collective masses have returned from the bar from their grandiose beer break, his persistent attack of hard house and electronic mayhem eventually wins people over. And the place is getting funky in more ways than one, with the influx of fresh blood, scores of people who weren't interested, or didn't bother to show up for any of MUTEK's other nights, jacked up on the highs of their chosen poison and the music of their heroes.

I didn't much mind, mainly because I was having a good time, but partly because I knew that Thomas Brinkmann would take the stage, and with one whiff of his grinding neo-industrial onslaught, the housies would run for cover and their Basement Jaxx CDs, and techno would win the day once and for all. Sure enough, Brinkmann comes on and unleashes ten minutes of two turntables (with cut vinyl for extra-abrasive noise) and the most brutal slab of jagged noise this side of Imminent Starvation, all leading into ... two hours of pounding tech-house, which drives the masses into a two hour fit of Philippe Cam levels of madness.

Although MUTEK was billed as the meeting of blipping and clicking, there was actually very little of that, particularly when compared to last year's lineup. Ironically, one of the only instances of that style (during the 3+ days that I attended) was in the hour long lead-in to Herbert's performance. It may still say "music, sound and new technologies", but those simple definitions have undoubtedly changed given this drastic shift in focus. On one hand, MUTEK is expanding its horizons, which, as a design for life or as a cliche, is rarely a bad thing. On the other hand, those strict boundaries were allowed to melt, morphing MUTEK from a highly unique and concentrated gathering of like-minded artists and fans into something more closely resembling a party stacked with a big name lineup that could have been found in Toronto, or LA, or _____. Big fish, small pond, etc. I fear the day when the ravers crowd out the devoted techno fans who have actually gone through the trouble of closely following the scene.

Reading over the above, how elitist I must appear. Just my bad self acting up. My good self, I must assure you, welcomes diversity, welcomes any event that could carry the variation in musical style and groundbreaking impact of 1993's "See The Lights" tour, featuring Moby, Orbital, Aphex Twin and Vapourspace (in the long ago days before the film soundtracks and TV commercials), and will happily show you his music collection to prove it. My good self, too worn out to dance after Thomas Brinkmann's marathon, but still with the yen for those repetitive beats, remained for a portion of Ricardo Villalobos' DJ set, hunched on a seat near a speaker behind the stage. On my way out to call it a night, I ran into Dirk Leyers, AKA the Finely Coifed One from Closer Musik. I stopped to chat with him about their upcoming album and their preference of old Ataris over the newest digital software.

I couldn't resist asking him if he saw Closer Musik more as a pop group or a techno group. They'd never really thought about it, he said, there was no master plan, and they were just doing what they enjoyed doing. He said that they'd played club gigs in Germany in front of techno audiences and they, like the Montreal crowd here on Saturday night, seemed really into their music. In a very deliberate way, these were the very things I hoped he'd say. The only restriction on the "genre" of pop music is that people like it. The last few days have been about pop music. It all comes down to pop music.

I stroll into SAT at 5:30, half an hour into Mitchell Akiyama's set and the place is packed to the tits. Deciding not to fight my way to the bar, I fight my way to the back and am fortunate enough to score a seat amongst the sea of incessant chatter. Like the Montreal Jazz Festival or any free event in Toronto, free music has a way of making fans of people. The mish-mash of personalities -- as varied in age and appearance as those from last Thursday at Ex-Centris -- enjoy their Happy Hour drinks as Mitchell Akiyama squiggles on. Conversation continues around the music. I read "Let it Blurt", a biography of rock critic Lester Bangs, as my contribution to the cocktail hour vibe.

These types of events make MUTEK difficult to gauge. Who comes to techno shows? If it's free, everyone does. But I doubt that the six year olds in attendance can save enough allowance from making their bed each day to save up for the newest Kompakt releases. So who comes to MUTEK? And when they come, do they know, or care, that Tomas Jirku scrapped his well known deep dub, Pole-ish approach in favour of a more slamming sound?

Coincidentally, Tomas Jirku is a major reason for me being here, which is certainly unbeknown to him. Once day last October, I made one of my regular visits to Penguin Music, where he was working, and he was playing a wonderful, Detroit-meets-Basic Channel techno concoction. At that point, I'd considered Kompakt releases to be a hit-and-miss series of highly abstract, irregular rhythms, sometimes lacking in melody and focus (I was somewhat confused and mixed up between Kompakt releases and those of its more experimental offshoot, Profan. So some of the qualities I attributed, in my mind at least, whether accurate or not, were attributed to Profan). I loved what Tomas was playing and bought it on the spot. That record was Jonas Bering's marvelous "Bienfait" and was easily the best thing I'd heard from the Kompakt family, which changed my perception of the label to the point that I bought and appreciated more of their work, and thus, the Kompakt label showcase (which includes Jonas Bering) was a major drawing point in getting me out to Montreal for MUTEK. Got all that? And my MUTEK peers -- what are their reasons for being here?

There's certainly the ambient drawing card, as I re-arrive at SAT at 9 PM sharp to find about fifty people already in attendance, many of them lying supine, bathing in lush ambient records. After some time, Olaf Dettinger's set begins. I used to always talk about the distinction between "warm" and "cold" ambient. Essentially, the labels are self-explanatory, with the former representing comfortable (including dubby) moodscapes and the latter focusing on isolationist ventures. My error was in pigeonholing all ambient into exclusively one category or the other. Dettinger's set drives home the exception. It's a beautiful blanket of sound, the sound of the night sky if it were filled with ten times as many twinkling stars (hence, the warmth) but also rich in lower harmonics and humming bass vibrations. And the volume seems to increase throughout, until it's downright intimidating, as the occasional stutter-stop rhythmic subtleties emerge to further throw off the body's sense of self-equilibrium (hence, the cold). And at 40 minutes, these feelings are all to fleeting, as in the meantime, the room continues to fill up and yet nobody budges an inch.

As expected, the place comes alive for Jonas Bering, who must have been getting the deep rub from his label brethren since the release of "Bienfait", because he bombards SAT with a set of funky, abstract techno (the "a" word is overused, but it's one I find difficult to avoid when it completely encapsulates so much of Kompakt's work) that bears little resemblance to said album or his recent 12-inches. In front of me, two French guys are standing and holding their drinks. One is wearing a turtleneck. They're trying to sway to the music as immeasurably as possible -- to project an image that they are too cool for all this music. Behind me, there are two women in formal wear. One of them sports a pearl necklace (Pearls Girl) and one wears a black dress that wears like a sash strapped over her shoulder (Black Sash Chick). They're dancing like pre-pubescent teenagers. To my right, there's a white guy with a huge afro (Fro Boy). He's not dancing. During the beatless moments between songs, people almost immediately stop dancing but when the beat begin again there's a hysteresis effect, as we the collective somehow take a good minute or two to get back into the beat. It's as if everyone's dancing out of instinct with their minds in some faraway place, and are relieved to have a breather when they hear the beats stop, but they have to look around and make sure it's not too unhip to recommence dancing. Whoa, did I fall asleep during Dettinger's set and wake up back in Toronto?

With that in mind, Tobias Thomas is a good four tracks into his set before he wins the crowd over. Which can't be blamed on him, as he treats us to a grade A selection of Cologne cuts, cavernously deep and yet equally lush. And he's a closet Britpopper, with a mop top haircut and a very campy Blumfield t-shirt (a French pop group, are they). Best yet, he dances during every second of his time behind the decks, which is something I really like to see because I do the same when I spin. Of at least I would dance if I was any good at spinning and could spend more time dancing and less time cueing records.

However, the nagging question that crawls in my mind during TT's performance is the question of why this showcase is headlined with Closer Musik -- a relatively new combo with but one 12-inch to their credit -- instead of one of the more established artists. But I was soon to discover that it was all in good sense and sensibility, because ladies and germs, Closer Musik are the WHOLE F'N SHOW.

They take to the stage looking like a couple of Germans (although one of them is Chilean, I know, but just go with me on this one). Polite Germans. Polite Germans wearing dark slacks and white collared shirts. Please insert snarky Kraftwerk comment here. With movie star haircuts. One of them has very short brownish hair and a round, babyish face (Babyface). The second, who bears a striking resemblance to Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter circa 1977, has longer black hair with well-styled curly bangs, and hence is the Finely Coifed One. They break into simple electropop, which is probably all they *can* play from the antiquated look of their equipment. I look closer -- they've got a pair of 1987 Ataris and a sampler that looks like it was assembled on an episode of "Junkyard Wars". Are we having a Pac-man contest later on? Yow -- the Finely Coifed One is gyrating and styling like he thinks he's Tom Jones! And he's got a microphone!! And he's going to sing!!!

"Dah, dah, dah" he signs, aspiring to be the second coming of Hasselhoff. And people are going WILD for this stuff! Babyface and the FCO occasionally look at each other and smile. This is the most fey performance in the history of techno, which is sort of like calling something the most grueling performance in the history of croquet, or canasta, or dominoes. Does techno really need an injection of fey? I don't know.

"Whassup, whassup, whassup" sings the FCO, although it more closely resembles a cross between a croon and a whisper. Babyface often tinkers with the ancient computers. The songs are so basic, it's unclear what is keeping him so busy, but still, he tinkers. Later on, Babyface picks up ... an electric guitar! Everyone pops like balloons at the mere sight of the guitar. And to think, in 1994 it was a major controversy when Underworld had the gall to use a guitar in their live shows. They even used them to trigger samples. Some people were calling for their heads on silver platters because of this. And now Closer Musik bust out the six string and get huge cheers. The FCO warbles something about the stars while Babyface picks out the occasional melody over the simple backbeat and four chord accompaniment. I overhear Fro Boy saying that the point of all this is to "do the things that you're not supposed to do". How true, but somehow, however inconceivable it may seem, Closer Musik and their dinky, catchy melodies are fun-tastically brilliant. This may all go to pot and fall into a casualty ditch as did with Rephlex records' similar experimentations with electro-retro-futurism, but for now, this crowd adores them and they attempt an encore. Predictably, ironically and unfortunately, something goes awry with their aging sampler which prevents it from happening.

Tobias Thomas returns to the decks and revives the room (which had lost some hot air due to the downtime from CM's technical difficulties) with deep, but ordinary house music. Frighteningly, despite being presented with the most unremarkable music of the festival, it goes over better than a stripper on a battleship. Philippe Cam levels of insanity ensue, with the crowd going nuts during every breakdown. Pearls Girl and Black Sash Chick are having copious amounts of fun. I spot them embracing and kissing -- wa-hey, they're lesbians, COOL! But is it really true that the attendees of MUTEK have hearts that beat for house, while techno stands out only as their cheap, outer facade? Minimalism, bah! Breakdowns are the antithesis of minimalism. After 20 minutes, I'm about ready to give up on them and head out, but the tempos speed up, the music gets harsher, and with Dave Clarke's "Red 2", the transition is complete. We're in a hard techno zone. People still love it, although those pops are considerably quieter. So does anyone truly care about the techno, or is MUTEK just the best dance party happening this weekend? "The whole of MUTEK's programme can be seen as a long trajectory over five days" says the flyer, with its long words and purple prose digital smooth culture performance compositional organic textures abstract collage floaty pretty warm blissful rippling ambiance blah blah blah. Sure, until next weekend's rave, that is.

After a couple of hours of frenetic dancing, I depart, personally satisfied but disillusioned in the slightest.

Traum was the featured label last night. I have not been actively following their label's activities, which now seems to have been a mistake. I arrived at SAT a little after ten, and there were already twice as many people there as at any point the previous night. The whole place was lounging, standing and listening intently to Process. The sound at SAT is not the greatest, as I had noticed the previous night, such is the reality of square shaped buildings with high ceilings. But after seeing Sigur Ros, and now Process, I am beginning to think that performing in a cavern helps them sound better. Process plays music that drips from the walls, much like being in a dark, damp underground cavern, with each droplet of water that hits the ground smacking you in the face in the form of a blip or a bass rumble. He even added beats to this stew by set's end, and right on cue, people danced to this wierd stuff. Wierd was in the air at the start of the night. I sampled several locations in the room, but the first was the stoner/chatmonger corner. Generally, people were transfixed on this creepy, atmospheric techno, and the room's scenery: black and concrete, with many people sitting on the floor, bore out the mood of the music.

Gustavo Lamas then shifted gears completely, drowning the room in a lush synthesized warmth. Beats, subtle yet driving, propel most of his set. I had never heard of Lamos, but he's obviously heard of one of my favourites: Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. Gas and Chain Reaction dubbiness will never fail to get a big thumbs up from me, particularly when those baselines scream Fluxion all over. He may walk on soil that has already been tread, but Lamas stomped a mudhole in it. But it's nothing compared to the stomping and general insanity that resulted the moment Philippe Cam took the stage. I guess the bald, aging Frenchman is a sage to the young, dance-stoked Quebecois. The whole place danced like bastards to M. Cam's approach to house, which consists of everything you need for house except the 4/4 beat and the hi-hat. Sequenced electronic loops blanket the mix, and the whole thing was cruelly minimal, in a Vainqueur sort of way, so frankly, it was nothing short of brilliant. And people danced like chickens with their heads cut off. Did I mention that there was rarely a beat to speak of? Amazing.

The countryman vibe continued with Montreal's own Akufen as your headliner. He started by roping everyone into a false sense of security, Process-style, with the stuck-in-a-cave atmospherics, which soon exploded into furious (but minimal, of course) techno beats with various electronic mayhem spread on top. Oh yes, everyone danced like a bastard again. I did too, except during the time I laid down to rest my aching back. I just basked in the harshness of it all, although my back did feel better. Afterward, this trend of steadily increasing volume continued. By the time Akufen took the stage, the walls seemed as if they were shaking. Then, at 2:30 AM, label boss Triple R took to the decks to engage the room in some truly righteous stripped-down, deep techno, inasmuch that the loudest sound in the room seemed not to be the music, but the furious vibrations of the speaker cones. The half of us that stayed on to witness this cleansing continued to dance like the bastards that we are.

Five hours can really fly by quickly, you know.

I don't feel that I've been part of a musical "scene" for a long time now, a good five years, likely (and this hasn't changed, that's not where this is going). The problem is twofold. One, with time, any scene gets to be so damn big that either I don't have the time to follow everything in it, or I find myself not liking an appreciable fraction of the music within it. Two, my range of musical interests has grown so much over the years that I no longer have the desire to concentrate most of my energies on one particular type of music. Thus, it's all boiled down to two things: good music and bad music. Techno, for one, is so complicated, with everyone in the business running record label(s), each one for a different set of ideas, DJs coming to town all the time, a CRIPPLING number of new releases every week, etc. You see, many techno artists have home built studios, thus, they can crank out new tracks on their own time without having to suck major label corporate dick to get company money behind $100 000 of studio time and subsequent album promotion (not that there's anything wrong with that). I have very little will for keeping up with all these activities, I'm much happier walking into a store, grabbing a bunch of interesting looking vinyl, listening to it, and buying my favourites.

Under the canopy of "stuff I like" are the musics presented at MUTEK, in Montreal, which is where I am right now. Minimal, bleeps, blips, "clicks and cuts" (ugh), whatever it is, I like it. I have no yen to get in touch with the newest digital trends or label launches. I just want to spend a weekend in a city listening to wicked techno. That's enough for me.

Yesterday, I visited Ex-Centris, home to the first two nights of MUTEK, to pick up tickets that I had reserved (for this coming weekend). At the risk of coming across as elitist, I expected MUTEK to draw a more "intelligent" breed of fan compared to the powder-sucking go-go dancers that Toronto City Council seems to worry about. Well, I got what I expected, all right. Ex-Centris looks like a Greek temple decorated by the hand of European sleekness. Huge columns flank the outside. Upon entering, you immediately notice the purple glow of the neon lights in the darkened cocktail lounge to the right. I walk up to a tellers face just inside the entrance. That's right, just her face, on a round video screen on an otherwise black, opaque wall. The head says that I can pick up my tickets from the media table inside.

Inside, the scene resembles a crowd gathered for a university lecture or an art exhibit. Young bohemian types mix with White Men in Suits in a large softly-lit atrium. An impressive scene in the sense that it shatters all preconceptions about "rave culture" by practically outclassing the upper class. I don't even know if everyone was there for the same purpose (probably not) but the fact that techno fans seamlessly were mingling in a setting more reminiscent of a museum opening than a rave was damn cool. The whole scene was 100 times more swank than I would have expected. I pick up my ticket and slide to the adjacent table to grab a MUTEK t-shirt and CD (featuring tracks from the artist performing here). A patron and the woman behind the counter were talking techno (en francais). He was inquiring about the other CDs on sale and what they sounded like. The talk turns to Goem, and I try and help out by sharing my knowledge of Goem's music (en anglais, on ne veut pas m'ecouter, quand je parle francais, j'ai oublie presque tout la langue).

Later that night, I went to the Society of Arts and Technology building (SAT) for a nightcap. I'd visited SAT earlier in the day, and again, I was struck by the whole museum aspect of it. Temporary bars were set up in the corners, while a mass of electronics, belonging to that day's Happy Hour performers, occupied a side of the room. The electronics table was set up in front of about a dozen, small, round cocktail tables, with trendily dressed twenty-somethings sitting at them making polite conversation. Toward the rear of the building, partially obscured by a big black curtain, was a larger area, presumably the dance floor for the main performances. Grey floors, black curtains, not much else -- a minimalist indoor cafe.

Oh yes, the music. Mike Shannon worked a seamless two-hour set on the decks, jumping constantly among his three decks, fingers always busy, something like Spiderman, if he had spun house and techno. For part of his set, I sat at a candle-lit cocktail table and read, in one of the digital culture mags that they were giving away, about how digital video is causing a stir in Hollywood. Oddly similar to the analog v. digital, vinyl v. CD argument. Of course, I also danced, but being a bit tired from walking around Montreal all day, spent some time sitting on one of the many person-sized, shin-level cushioned platforms that were scattered throughout the room. I particularly enjoyed sitting behind the performing platform, away from much of the crowd, where I could relax and watch the performers work either in the flesh or on one of the two giant video screens on either side of the stage. Then, there was a live performance by Chilean duo Ric y Martin. Their stripped-down locked grooves were doing it for me, although I'm not sure I could say the same about most of the rest in attendance (at least for those were dancing, who seemed to be searching for a few more quirks and breaks in the rhythms). This may or may not bode well for the rest of the festival, particularly the Kompakt showcase.

Nothing sensational last night, but certainly solid. Bring on the label showcases.