Sunday, June 02, 2002

MUTEK Day Five. Besides my "dessert" theory as previously explained, there's another important reason for looking forward to the final happy hour at SAT. It's Toronto in the hizzouse and I'm stoked to see my boys represent. As I arrive, Jay Hunsberger has just begun his DJ set and I'm thrilled beyond belief to state that techno, hard, minimal techno, not tech-house or IDM or some clicky gliche - TECHNO has FINALLY made its debut at MUTEK 2002 (Deadbeat-Monolake feels like SUCH a long time ago). I check out Hunsberger's skills and chill out to his gloriously rough records. Then it's time for transplanted Torontonian Mike Shannon's first ever live gig. Despite not playing live before today, Shannon is hardly an unknown, particularly in his present home of Montreal, and a good portion of the crowd this afternoon seems to be here just to see him. If he feels the pressure, he sure doesn't show it, bringing home the bacon with aplomb courtesy of a solid hour of sweeping, panoramic TECHNO while everyone in the building dances their asses off. Finally, Pan/Tone gets the funk out with his gritty, urban take on minimal TECHNO, although I certainly could have done without his afro-endowed friend who tagged along to do a couple of freestyles with the music and sit on stage, smoke, and try to look cool. This afternoon may have been the best two and a half hour stretch of the festival, and maybe my opinion is skewed because I'm so happy to hear some TECHNO, but it sure as hell feels right. T.O. rules.

Somewhere deep inside me, I've been dreading MUTEK's final night. The programme promises a Latin-tinged evening. Tribal and Latin flavoured house is probably dance music's ugliest scourge, the rhythmic overload is an unnecessary frill, in my opinion. Plus, it reminds me of dirty crusties and shallow ravers and all the other bad stuff that MUTEK manages to expertly avoid. Furthermore, if tonight is meant to be MUTEK's dessert night, it implies that we'll hear music that is fluffier and more lightweight than the previous two nights, and I've already given my opinion about those, so you can imagine my concern.

Alain Mongeau starts by spinning downtempo click dub. So far, so good. Then, Murcof brings to the table one of the most original styles of the festival. Backed by nature visuals in blurry, soft pastel colours, the music is a mix of glacially slow house beats, lush droning backgrounds a la Gas, and the soulful ambient spirit of Em:t label (RIP) ambient. Nobody knows whether to sit down, stand up, or dance, so all three end up getting done. I'm not as emotionally stirred as Murcof may want me to be, but I certainly respect his unique direction.

And I respect Juan Self for a different reason - TECHNO! Latin-tinged my ass, the advertising was false because he plays nothing short of in-your-face, pounding TECHNO. That assessment changes a bit toward the end as the tunes pick up more of a house sensibility, but any negative feelings about that are negated by his live electric piano solo, a sparkling bit of musicianship that I can't ever recall seeing during a one man show. Plus, the obvious fun that he's having on stage is infectious.

In the five minutes following the conclusion of Juan Self's show, the number of people in SAT appears to have doubled. The place is now as jammed as it was for the Sunday performances last year, and the impatient wait begins as equipment is assembled for the remainder of the evening's performances. With Uwe Schmidt, aka about a billion aliases with a billion varying styles, you can never quite be sure what you're going to get. But I definitely didn't think we'd get his interface on the video screen and find something straight out of the land of the long-lost Commodore Pet. And then he launches into highly minimal, electro-laden TECHNO. And I wonder why software needs to be so complicated. The latest issue of Grooves magazine has twenty-five pages of software reviews, and most have them feature interfaces that look like airplane consoles. I've seen simple and complicated software this year at MUTEK but Schmidt's takes the cake hands down in the rustic conservatism category. But it's absurdly simple - he loads up a bunch of audio files, synchs using MIDI loops, adjusts the levels of a sixteen-track equalizer that strangely reminds me of playing Space Invaders on my Vic 20, etc. He likes to throw free-form synth solos near the end of his greatly extended tracks, he likes to wear a straight-from-the-70's pink suit with a wide collar, and he's managing to confuse a hell of a lot of people with his performance. Yes, songs over 130 bpm do exist!!! And sometimes they even hit 160 bpm such as his final, DbB-inflected track. But the humming bass and minimal stylings have sold me no matter what the tempo. Uwe Schmidt is groovier than the surface of the moon.

Unbelievably, this evening is just hitting its stride. Dandy Jack's name may suggest that he's fruitier than an apple orchard, and the programme may suggest more Latin influences, but Dandy Jack says "to hell with that, I know what the people want and it's TECHNO, quaking beats, honest-to-goodness TECHNO" and proceeds to do just that, bringing Copacapannark levels of madness to SAT. And I realize a flaw in my earlier theories - I may have found the litmus test for tech-house, but it's a lot harder to distinguish between hard house and TECHNO. That's certainly the case with Dandy Jack's stuff. Frankly, I don't care about it too much at the moment because I'm too busy dancing my ass off. Dandy Jack's dancing his ass off as well, somehow finding the time to play music as well. And yet, the evening is still just hitting its stride.

Dandy Jack's performance segues directly into the "jam session" with Schmidt and Villalobos. The sight of the three of them on stage, playing and dancing in front of Schmidt's green and black and straight outta Commodore Pet video screen reminds me of how much I regret not having a camera with me. Last year, the screens were adorned mainly with web-cam shots of the performers, instead of the stunning visual images that are in abundance this year. Even Metropolis, whose Eurodisco image clashes with the MUTEK aesthetic, (which, like it or not, is still strongly correlated to the notion of one person, a darkened room, a laptop, and a bedroom floor) still produced some startling would-be shots of bespectacled wizards like Farben bathed in purple light and dry ice smoke. And the jam goes on, with Dandy Jack throwing spine rocking beat over spine rocking beat, Villalobos making his electronic toys squeal and purr, and Schmidt on solo synth. The beat counter on Schmidt's screen repeats 1..2..3..4.. and counts the same two bar loop, all the time, over and over, even after Schmidt bows out and sits to enjoy the rest.

Ric Y Martin rock on and on, and though many people have left due to the late hour, those who remain show absolutely no sign of tiring. And neither do the two Chileans, who shape and mold their simple beat structures into hills and valleys of TECHNO like an Underwood remix gone haywire and left to its own devices. The remaining people, let me call them the "MUTEK faithful", are thus named for creating this beautiful situation in which I find myself. They've stuck around to give the festival the brig, bright, happy ending it deserves, and whether they'd still be doing so if it was some flimsy house DJ up there is not my concern at this moment. The point is, they're here participating in an endurance contest masquerading as a nightcap, and it's not for the weak of heart. They keep up the raucous atmosphere until the energy has mostly drained away come four AM. Nonetheless, Dandy Jack and Ricardo Villalobos continue with conviction. I'm in complete awe of these guys right now, still cranking out killer material while the sun begins to rise outside. Dandy Jack has been on stage for four hours with hardly any rest. I've got to pack it in, I have a train to catch in the morning. I lose. You guys win. TECHNO wins.

Saturday, June 01, 2002

MUTEK Day Four. Midway through Losoul's set at Metropolis, I think I've figured it all out. I have a couple of minor revelations while I dance with little enthusiasm. I've edited Alain Mongeau's 2+2+1 theory, putting my own +/- 9 theory in its place. The theory is as follows: MUTEK events which begin before 9 PM are the "main course". The rest is "dessert". These nights at Metropolis have been fun, but it's doubtful that I'll remember them as anything special six months from now. Like chocolate cake after a multi-course meal, it's nice to have but I would survive without it. The main course, however, is a taste I'll remember for a long time.

Hours before, I'm seated in front of the stage at SAT for an afternoon soiree of music from the Ortholong Musik label. For this showcase, I head in with a clean slate (having not any reading up on the artists), a notebook, a comfy chair, a couple of the free mags distributed by MUTEK, and a beer. I'm going for the full monty happy hour vibe, it's going to be a long afternoon so I need to properly settled.

Stephan Matthieu takes the stage. So much for happy hour. The lingering, billowing tones are not dissimilar to those featured in his Thursday night set, but they are much, much louder. Soon, he adds a low-end drone that plugs itself straight into my ears - it literally seems to muffle all other sounds, like earplugs would. After half an hour, he releases the spell. Matthieu is something else. Even when the volume becomes menacing, his music remains oddly soothing. The world badly needs more loud ambient music.

Timeblind's set is cut short by a couple of computer crashes, but not before he puts in a solid forty-five five minutes of downtempo beats, much in the style of Asphodel records. A bit slow for my bag, but I'm game.

Then, a real treat. AGF, who is this month's XLR8R cover star, takes us on a journey through the 21st century's haunted house music. No spooky screams and cackles, just dense, shifting moodscapes with her own near-whispered, angelic vocals on top. It's haunting in the sense that it is continually unsettling. The closest comparison I can think of is Mira Calix in that they both make you feel uneasy, and are adept at incorporating noise and other unpredictable sounds into the music. I mention the magazine cover as a tip of the hat to them for the prominent feature on a musician whose talents, pleasant Bjork-ish vocal style aside, place her in a "strange and wonderful hidden gem" category that lies so far to the left of the electronic mainstream. I'm also incredulous that it costs only eight dollars to sit in SAT and hear all this stuff. It's almost criminal.

As if she hadn't worked hard enough, she's then joined by Vladislav Delay for a set of deep house with her unconventional vocals and his unconventional stutter-rhythmic beats. The smiles on their faces are obvious, and these bonus beats certainly keep the smile on mine. Finally, Philip Sherbourne gives further props to San Francisco, spinning a set of house and two-step to end an afternoon of delicious chillout and groove treats.

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Ben Neville begins playing to a near empty house. There was such a large anticipation for the Friday night show that it is natural for the Saturday night show to become easily overlooked. Neville is playing video games on the huge screen behind the stage at Metropolis. Actually, he's put his software interface on the screen, but controls it with what suspiciously looks like a joystick. A quick check of the MUTEK program reveals that Neville is doing an interdisciplinary Masters in music and engineering, working in music software design. I'm fully behind anyone who wishes to narrow the ordinarily cavernous music/physical science divide, even if he is an engineer. Anyhow, Neville stares intently at the huge screen, as relaxed as can be. You'd think he's wasting a Sunday afternoon in his living room, instead of performing at one of the most prestigious electronic music festivals in the world. Meanwhile, I work at trying to understand his interface. He improvises wildly, constantly looping new sounds into the mix. I have to laugh at some of the file names - "porn kick" for a particularly bodacious beat, and "chick groove" for his most accessible bit of deep house as the set nears a close. Sure enough, girls (and boys) go wild for it, proving that Neville is a subversive genius.

Even more astounding is the set by Farben, which pulls off the exceedingly difficult double play of staying true to the "I bet you thought it was dead" click-dub sound of a couple years hence, and yet thoroughly winning over John Q. Standardclubgoer in 2002. The smooth and mellow basslines effortlessly hypnotize the crowd (which has been rapidly swelling in size), while the vinyl crackles and pops add further depth and texture to his already full sound. After making loads of new friends, he cools them off with a fifteen minute beatless quake-dub session. This set-long progression from hard to mellow is a beautiful art to behold.

Losoul are another matter entirely, as I spend a great deal of his set flip-flopping opinions and engaging myself in musico-psychological discourse. First, I discover the difference between good tech-house and bad tech-house. If it's good, when you speed it up, voila, it's TECHNO (i.e. Repair, Salz). If it's bad, when you speed it up, you've got house music played at +8 (most of the rest). As I am congratulating myself on how smart I am, Losoul starts playing a stripped-down minimal house track in which he gorgeously wigs out and stretches the track over many a tantalizing minute. Ah, pleasure. But I still like my theory.

Nonetheless, Farben's amazing performance aside, there's nothing tonight that blows my mind, as was the case last night, which leads me to my second theory: the MUTEK evening events have been somewhat disappointing. On the other hand, the pre-9 PM events have been consistently astounding. Events that started after 9 PM have been fun, yes, but there's little so absolutely essential that I wouldn't have dared miss it. . And isn't that the definition of dessert? It's tasty, but it's not sustenance.

I take time to rest at the beginning of Ricardo Villalobos' set and it's fortunate because he plays hard, jacking, hard, and did I mention *hard* house littered with interludes of dark sci-fi experimentation. The intensity of it all would have floored me, and from the looks of it, many in the audience are having that exact problem. Instead, I wait for the linoleum-smooth minimal house grooves of Luomo, aka Vladislav Delay, who is making his second appearance today. Delay's story is intriguing. Revered for his work in '99-'00, one of the top draws for the clicks-n-cuts-heavy edition of MUTEK 2000, but now somewhat damaged goods due to his name's close association with the CnC genre, whose name in turn now causes everyone to run and hide their eyes. Through it all, however, he was producing amazing house music that garnered comparatively little attention. Personally, I found his clic…ah, your know…work too disjointed, his use of irregular rhythms failed to excite me. And furthermore, I couldn't imagine why he'd want to bother with that esoteric stuff when he was capable of making such incredible house music, particularly when his angelic good looks would make him an instant poster boy within the genre to boot. So, Luomo gives the evening a comfortable dance-friendly conclusion.