(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.