The stage at Station contains three tables stacked with an ungodly sum of gear. With fancy electronic boxes and gutted customized turntables, it's a cross between a science lab and a rummage sale.

And there's food! Cakes, cheeses, mini-quiches, it's like a high-class event or something! The group of four begins their ensemble improvisation, and after fifteen minutes I figure that we're not meant to sit here on the floor the entire afternoon so I wander to the bar to put away some food. I'm never entirely sure what people mean by "sound art" but in my version I will see how things sound in various parts of the venue, check out various sightlines of the performers. To paraphrase Brian Eno (in a statement about ambient music), the music will be confined to the stage, but I am going to move around.

The nearly two-hour presentation is composed of several long sections. From the balcony behind the stage, I look to get a better sense of what each artist is doing. To mine eyes, Philip Jeck supplies ambient background and sonic squiggles while stoically gazing at his "tools" in a state of deep concentration. One such tool is a Casio SK-1 keyboard, which must be the simplest sampling keyboard ever. It was a toy when I was a kid and now I'm paying good money to come to Montreal to watch somebody play it. Martina Rosenfield is a more traditional turntablist, scratching and fast-cutting with her mixer and her two 1200's. On the other half of the stage, the violent half, Martin Ng is showing a separate side of his personality compared to the variations on silence he was doing with Reconnaissance a couple of nights ago. He viciously abuses his tone arm, literally pressing down on it with his fist, all while going psycho with effects and sudden, violent backspins. How many tone arms must he go through in a year? Finally, Martin Tetrault coaxes sounds from his beaten down turntables by handling a two tone-arm player like a four-year old child whose parents forgot to feed him his morning dose of Ritalin. How many styli must he go through in a year? These guys use their turntables as percussion instruments, thumping and pounding the needles on various surfaces. At one point, Tetrault is simply dropping a record on the tone arm from a three-foot height. At other times, he's simply smacking the tone arm with a record as if he were swatting a fly with it. This goes beyond using vinyl as a sound source, because he could have used a magazine or a piece of cardboard as means for achieving the same ends. This is vinyl as an object of fixation. I recall that last night I was dancing for hours to minimal techno in a big fancy nightclub. Merely twelve hours later, I'm at a wine and cheese eating a cinnamon raisin bun while watching a man beat up his turntable with a record. Kids, that's why I travel 600 km to see this music festival.

Lastly, the Mole uses five turntables to create a seamless flow of minimal techno using exclusively locked grooves. I'm assuming that he cut each groove into the records to always run at the same tempo (I never saw him touch a pitch adjustment), which leaves him plenty of time to manipulate the sounds coming from three or four records playing simultaneously. Had I not known the basis of what he was doing, I'd have figured him to be a DJ with a remarkable sense of tempo who loves his EQ's. But knowing the "secret" to maintaining a constant temp, wouldn't he have an easier time doing this solely on computer? Of course it would. But it wouldn’t be nearly as fun. A screen and a mouse are no match for the physicality of jockeying between several turntables. 28:38.

Somehow, Metropolis appears even more packed than the last two nights, and that's saying something. And compared to those shows there's an enormous variety of people of different colours, ages, and styles. There's clubbies, preppies, young frat boys, older more weathered ex-ravers. It's like Toronto, except they're all dancing! Typically, I’m all in favour of this kind of variety, but with variety comes the near impossible task of trying to please everybody at once. That's not a problem here tonight. Algorithm sticks close to the Montreal micro-techno blueprint and it's solid enough, but not exactly something to get the crowd rocking. Then again, that's not his job tonight. That falls on Cobblestone Jazz’s mantle. Absurdly infectious, they get me dancing to jazzy house without a contrary thought, whereas normally I'd tire rapidly of that style of house. It certainly helped that the beats were a bit rough around the edges.

There's a tangible "big event" feeling lingering in the air. Everybody knows and understands that what we're about to see is a rare event. If it's the last ever performance of Kraftwerk songs by Senor Coconut y Su Conjunto, then it's a shame, not least because if they returned to Montreal for the jazz festival in a month, they would surely incite revelry in the streets and sell a billion CD's. Despite the novelty graphics on the video screen (Space Invaders, robots, etc.), it's obvious when seeing them that they are no novelty act. Musicianship this good is no joke. Marimba and vibraphone players with this sort of dexterity aren't looking for laughs. I'm sure the majority isn't well versed with the Kraftwerk originals, but the band holds the crowd in the palms of their hands for a solid hour and a half. And Uwe Schmidt, despite sticking out somewhat by being the only band member dressed in a full suit, plays the role of the anti-star and stands off to the side with his laptop and lets the rest of the band be the stars. If you didn't enjoy this show, then you have no pulse. For their (last?) performance of Kraftwerk songs, the band plays: Showroom Dummies, Trans-Europe Express, The Man Machine, It's More Fun to Compute / Home Computer, The Robots, Neon Lights, Autobahn, Musique Non Stop. Encore I: Tour de France. Encore II: Expo 2000.

Talk about a tough act to follow. But Lucien N Luciano just sees it as a crowd that's all good and warmed up for his performance. His style is similar to that of his countrymen (and Mutek alumni) Dandy Jack and Ricardo Villalobos, although I don't feel quite as much tension and kick as I do in their work. I get a final run of dancing out of my system and stop the Mutek clock a bit early tonight. I'm still suffering withdrawal effects from Senor Coconut, and tomorrow’s a big day. 33:25.