Today's panel is sure to be a breeding ground for spirited opinions. It's entitled "Riding the Digital Wave: How to Embrace Music Dissemination on the Internet". With such a hot-button topic, you certainly don’t expect to reach a consensus and solve any major problems. It's all about hearing what people have to say and acquiring new information and ideas. On that basis, this panel was exceedingly informative and thought provoking.

There are numerous statements of note. Journalist (and this morning's moderator) Philip Sherburne begins with an opening statement to kick the discussion into high gear right off the bat. He addresses major issues in a partisan manner, glossing over the potential shifts from albums to songs, from labels to distributors, etc., which are the consequences of a transformation into an internet-based music industry. Through an informal poll in the room, it's determined that nearly everyone has downloaded music from the internet, but only about one-fifth have actually paid to do so at one time or another. On the other hand, only a handful of those in attendance believe that music should be readily available for free. Depending on one's philosophy, one may consider it a disturbing sign of the times that only 20% have found it within themselves to pay for downloading. Poll inaccuracies notwithstanding, I'm not about to sound a death knoll for record companies based on the opinion of a hundred or so Mutek diehards, almost all of whom must be devoted music fans whose music collections likely require their own private residence. Let's just say they've contributed far more than their fair share toward sustaining the health of the music industry.

Beginning with musings on the quality and viability of the downloadable products out there, the conversation unsurprisingly gravitates toward a possible future in a purely virtual industry. Richard Chartier remains skeptical of downloaded music due to the inferior sound quality, and Daniel Levitin (Department of Music Theory at McGill) concurs, claiming that everybody loses if the technology caters to the lowest common denominator. Taylor Dupree, who plays devils advocate on more than one occasion today, remarks that the lower sound quality is not a permanent issue. As downloading speeds increase, the need for settling for smaller compressed files will alleviate. Furthermore, he doesn't think the average twelve-year-old kid cares about sound quality. They care about free.

Embracing the internet isn’t necessarily a sound business strategy. Richie doesn’t want +8 material posted on a site such as emusic, because they'd just get lost in the shuffle, lose their identity, and alienate their fan base. The internet can best provide convenience and quality, according to Daniel. For example, video stores supply these services. People will gladly pay money to rent or buy a movie because the store offers them what they want, when they want it. Inevitably, the movie can be seen on TV for free, but not necessarily at the consumers' best convenience. Richie has embraced a different type of convenience via technology such as Final Scratch, and much discourse takes place regarding the advantages of using these modern tools.

The question period is an intertwining of impassioned pleas and venting together with actual inquiries. There is an argument for the virtualization of music based on the environmental advantage of saving on packaging, which is a stance I'd never considered before. As for myself, I'm not certain if mp3's have "value" in the same way that buying actual music has value to those who collect it. Richie disagrees, claiming teenagers today treasure the CD and DVD collections they've assembled themselves via the internet in much the same way as people our age treasure our vinyl collections. If so, will music collecting as we now know it cease to exist someday? If everything becomes available on the internet eventually, then it'll be possible for anyone to replicate my music collection, possibly for free, with the click of a few buttons. I like to think that I'm open-minded about the issue of downloading (partly manifesting through my use of quotation marks when referring to "illegal" downloading) but as a dedicated collector who takes pride in his work, that's fairly scary.

But everything that's been discussed is rife with contradictions. Richie tells a story about searching high and low for a Kevin Saunderson record, and when he finally found it (somewhere in Detroit), he put it away and lost most of his interest in it. Clearly, the chase and the thrill of the search can be more fun for him than the catch. The story struck a personal chord with me and some other panel members. It's so relieving to know that people other than myself do those things. For a long time I felt guilty, assuming I was merely addicted to obtaining the music more so than the physical enjoyment of it. Maybe there is some truth to that, but who cares, I know now that I'm just like all the other obsessive collectors! Anyhow, Taylor reminded Richie that twenty minutes ago, he'd been lauding the benefits of having thousands of tracks available for him on mp3 at his utmost convenience, but was now proclaiming the enjoyment he had in searching high and low for a KMS record. It's a complete contradiction. So what gives?

The panel acknowledges the existence of these contradictions but there’s certainly no time here to attempt to resolve it. But upon further reflection, I wonder if it's really necessary. Similar contradictions exist in everyday life and I doubt anyone loses sleep over them. For example, everybody knows that food tastes much better when cooked in an oven, but there are many situations in which a microwave oven is faster and far more convenient. Nobody concerns themselves with this apparent contradiction because our choice of which oven to use depends on the situation at hand, and there is never any pressure or obligation to choose one or the other and live with that choice for all eternity. Sometimes the convenience of mp3's is too tempting to pass up, but other times one prefers to search vinyl emporiums for rare treasures. Why choose between them when you can have them both? Why choose between virtual music collecting and physical music collecting when you can have both?

I’m obviously biased and have spilled much virtual ink on addressing my personal concerns and climbing on my personal soapbox. But the entire session was recorded and will hopefully be made available in audio or transcript forms sometime soon. It is well worth checking out -- there was not a wasted moment during the whole two hours. Afterward, I'’m absentmindedly flipping through records in a nearby record shop and suddenly, it’s staring me in the face. I'd actively searched for it for months, gradually lost all hope of ever finding it, and thus it hadn't crossed my mind for several months. It's the vinyl single of Primal Scream's "Swastika Eyes", and for several seconds I'm unsure of exactly what I should do next. The search began two years ago, and it had now ended, almost by accident. Now what? Now what? 17:12.

There are tables and tables of gear packed onto the stage at Station, and only one laptop among the entire bunch! Even though it's retrogressive, it seems edgy and hip to see different machines up on stage. That’s what happens when laptop mania becomes the norm.

Montag is yet another Boards of Canada clone. Big ups though for the analogue synths, analog vocoder, and analog tambourine. And it's refreshing to see people, what's it called, uh, oh yeah, PLAYING melodies on a keyboard, talking to the audience between songs, etc. That just doesn’t happen within these genres of music. And what exactly is the big deal with BoC? I've never understood the hero worship there. So many acts rip them off as though they were innovators of the highest degree, but Kraftwerk covered all of their territory on "Autobahn" and "RadioActivity" more than twenty years before they released a record. I suppose it's simply a natural progression from techno's origins. It started out worshipping robots but there’s only so much anthropomorphism down that path, so people were more easily turned on to more rootsy folk-inspired material since then.

An abrupt change in style leaves most in the room bewildered. There's a lot more people here than yesterday, and many of them appear to be irregulars who have popped in out of curiosity to check out the local talent. That explains the confusion around Ototo's monster looped grooves. It's not exactly ear candy for the masses. But I'm also confused for completely different reasons. They lay down killer beat after killer beat, coax odd spurts of belles and whistles from their machinery ... and the song kind of just ends. I know it's minimalism and all, but you still need to know where you'll be taking the beat before you start it. Still, in a perfect world, more than a few people would be tapping their toes.

And it's yet another drastic shift, this time to [sic]'s icy atmospherics. If the programmers threw together this diverse program in order to mess with people's heads, then it's working. And putting it on the Friday afternoon, when they knew full well they'd get the largest casual audience, that would be the work of a badass diabolical genius. Now half the people are standing, half are sitting, and the surprise this time is Pierre Crude. At first I fear we're in for even more bloody folktronica, but I'm quickly convinced otherwise by the daft, tinny, childlike sounds from his Casio (which more than live up to the cheesy Casio stereotype), offbeat lyrics, kitsch melodies, and gay (in any sense of the word) dancing and goofy smiles coming from the brain and body of a black clothed baldie. This is as close as electronic music is likely to come to its very own Daniel Johnston. But don’t get too used to it, because more change is a coming. Sixtoo have records on both Vertical Form and Ninja Tune, two labels that I didn’t think had too much in common. After watching Sixtoo, the blending of the styles of the two labels starts to make sense. The DJ Krush beats and vibes plus the dense backgrounds from the Vertical Form releases come off as an obvious collusion in their talented hands. Almost by default, Sixtoo are the funkiest thing at Mutek. 20:04

In the spirit of minimalism, I'm going to be brief and use small words. Last year, the Friday night show at Metropolis was the "it" moment of the festival. With local talent Akufen as one of the central performers, it was a leap toward drawing a larger mainstream crowd while staying true to the established sounds of the festival. But this year, I'd have to think that the venue nearly sells itself. It looks to be a no-brainer to me -- hand over the reins to Richie Hawtin and his colleagues at m-nus and +8, and ride the name value to creative acclaim and big bucks. However, why bother with these accusatory capitalist incantations when the results are as amazing as this.

Simply put, this is the best evening of pure techno that I've ever seen. Act after act, each one better than the last, thump, thump, thump. Each artist rips apart the club, and the music gets harder and nastier. Jeremy P. Caulfield warms up and hands off to Magda and her turntables. Stark percussion, sharp pounding beats -- I'd know the +8 sound anywhere. Then Matthew Dear seems to double the volume, get darker and wildly nastier, while the beats come full circle to take on the role of full body massage. Finally, Richie brings the beats even harder, the funk even nastier, and plays the crowd like a fiddle with his uber-extreme dynamics.

Who needs house? Really, who needs it? Feed the people only techno, that's what they'll love eventually. Of course, feeding them a marquee headliner such as Richie Hawtin can't hurt. But none of the four lost the dance floor at any point tonight. 25:27.