From my MUTEK notes, posted as fast I can find the time to type them into the computer:
MUTEK Day One. This festival has approximately doubled in size each year it's been held. That's an enviable track record for a festival, stock portfolio, or local small business, let alone an event within the notoriously difficult-to-market underground electronic scene. Explaining this popularity surge can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. Simple - the tremendous reputation gained by MUTEK in the last two years has created a strong word of mouth buzz. It's retained its underground cred and stayed true to those roots as the hordes have amassed in larger and larger numbers.
Complicated - why does this reputation spread in the way that it does? Whatever people's reasons for wanting to see the North American debut of SND, how does one retain their long-term interest, and perhaps even more importantly, their money?
Coincidentally enough, MUTEK has put together a discussion panel for these very subjects. The "intersection" portion of the festival gathers panels of professionals in the field to discuss a variety of pertinent topics. The marketability issue, for me, is at least partly a case of "well, duh". I've been in Montreal for three hours and I've already seen print articles about MUTEK in "La Presse" and "Ici". As another example, CBC Radio's Patti Schmidt has been caning the festival for some time now (she is also sitting on one of the panels). This leads us to the decidedly non-shocking conclusion that if you want to market electronic music, write about the stuff in the paper and talk about it on the radio, just as you'd do with any other type of music.
In "Ici", MUTEK founder Alain Mongeau explains his "2+2+1" method for planning the schedule during each of the festival's three years. The first two days focus of experimental music, the second two are for more dancefloor-friendly material, and the final day is "dessert" - a fun evening of crowd-shaking eclecticism. The experimental shows themselves are held in an experimental venue, Ex-Centris, a building more reminiscent of an art museum than a dance hall. Socializing plays a big role in this festival. One can not ignore that MUTEK succeeds in portraying non-ambient music as background fodder for all occasions through its "happy hour" afternoon shows at SAT and its conference reception décor preceding these shows at Ex-Centris.
The show takes place in a lecture hall/meeting/ballroom, which is empty except for the sound equipment, soft lighting, and immaculate pale hardwood floors. They're immaculate enough for almost everyone to sit, lie, and recline on them; and this is the scene that greets MUTEK's first performer, Winnipeg's vitaminsforyou. There's considerable debt paid to Boards of Canada, but also many moments of icy serenity that pay their debt to the bitterly cold Winnipeg winters. I'm picturing snow squalls much in the way that people imagine the Icelandic tundra in Sigur Ros' music.
I'm at least a year behind the times with SND's music, so I was coloured surprised when they didn't launch into an ode to MUTEK 2000 - all clicks and cuts, all the time. Rather, they play highly simplistic beat-driven sound tracks. The beat is there, it may be irregular and there may be the occasional pop and whiz and reverberating high-pitched sound, but not much else. In addition, various sound effects peek through -- metallic, unnerving noises - yet overall, this music is strangely funky. I could listen to it all night.
But that ends the more conventional portion of the evening, as the next two artists are true to the multimedia aspirations of MUTEK. And due to the visual nature of the performances, it is quite difficult to describe. I doubt, however, that I'd want to hear Dioxyde's music separate from the visuals or vice versa. Besides, it would defeat the purpose since their "LoeeFrek" software is designed to produce images that react in real time to the music. The audio is a series of random crackles and rumblings, cut and pasted and looped together in lightning quick fashion. The visual is presented in three parts, each part representing a dimension of space, as the collections of dots begin by forming lines, then move on to shapes, and finally solids. On a plain black screen, the white dots pulse, shake, are pulled apart and drawn together like model imploding and exploding galaxies. It's fascinating, but after an hour ot it, it becomes too anodyne to continue holding my focus. As I'm thinking that, I'm jolted back to full attention by brazen bass notes, as the figures on screen practically explode into a frenzy of patterns completely unrecognizable from their original shapes. I would have hoped for more of this chaos.
My mind is read once more, this time by Mens/Koolwyk. Their performance is a continuum of anxiety and disorientation courtesy of a deep surge of rhythmic noise along with haywire flashes of coloured lines on the big screen, like a TV test pattern gone bonkers. (Un)fortunately, technical difficulty with the projector delayed the start of Mens/Koolwyk's performance, causing many people to leave in frustration and miss out of this brainwashing. The IDM pounding and the subdued high-frequency patterns aren't lobotomizing enough by themselves. It's the icing on top, the wild visuals, that kicks free the final fingers that hold off the descent into madness. It's so intense that I frequently need to look away, and after one such instance the performance ended abruptly, leaving me to wander off, dazed , in the drizzling rain, en route to SAT.
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It's electro-pop night at SAT, which is dessert in my book, particularly after the experience from the previous three hours. I hear the synth beat throb of Hellothisisalex as I'm coming up the street, but that's the extent of it, for as I'm walking in the door, they're waving goodbye. The show running late at Ex-Centris is the reason for the mistiming but it's all for the best because I doubt I could take too much of the lightweight stuff in one evening. Nova Huta and Felix Kubin are almost interchangeable except that the former begins with a ten minute monologue about the "uncle" who bequeathed him his first Casio keyboard and all his melodies, and the latter wears shiny clothing and features a funkier bottom end to his music. Otherwise, they both dance around joyfully, share the same equipment, and party like it's 1982. Unlike Closer Musik from last year, who approached retrofuturism with a keen ear for streamlined, minimal composition, Huta and Kubin are only about three minute pop songs. Which is fine in controlled doses.
