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.
