Noise day. I've been looking forward to this afternoon, probably more so than any other session. How often can you be subjected to so much noise in one sitting? The sound of an airhorn calls attention to Cal Crawford, who begins with a crackling reminiscent of Xenakis' "Concret PH", gets louder over the course of thirty minutes or so, and ends with -- what else -- another blast from his airhorn.

Now it's the start of the Mego label showcase, which ends up far exceeding even my highly prejudiced lofty expectations. Pita kicks it off, and ten minutes later, he’s making a heck of a lot of noise. The noise remains. The noise is loud but not abrasive. Then, the fun stops and the pain begins. In a good way. Kevin Drumm's weapon is a notebook-sized rectangular strobe placed innocently in front of his computer. It exposes this unsuspecting crowd to the most blatant cruel and unusual punishment I've ever been tortured into witnessing. It starts when he does, shining agonizingly brightly into our collective eyes, while the music jitters and stutters with the sound of an army of guitar riffs sliced up and randomly put back together. Ten seconds in, I'm hit with the not-so clairvoyant premonition that this strobe is likely to flash for the entire performance. The task at hand is to discover a way to survive it. Some cover their eyes with their hands or a piece of clothing. Some look down or away. I give it a try, but there’s no escaping it. Looking down, the flashing and pulsing is unavoidable, and with my eyes closed, the morphing colours and shapes are still smeared across the insides of my eyelids, not to mention the drifting blobs of blue and purple from the lingering afterimages. But mainly, I don'’t fear the light, I merely obey and stare straight at it. Drumm appears as a shadowy, mysterious, faceless figure amid the vivid whiteness. It doesn’t take long for my eyes to start playing tricks on me. A white halo appears around the strobe, as waves appear to pulse in and out, pushing back and then drawing as though it were the burning bush of legend. This is just about the trippiest thing ever. In the meantime, the "music" is now stupidly loud. The strobe slows down to about 110 bpm, which makes my eyes turn all sorts of new tricks. I'm theorizing that the significant slowing to a pulse that the eye can actually track has convinced my eyes that tracking the pulse is a good idea. In reality, the light is far too powerful for the eye to remain open, so the result is a forcible blinking at a tempo not of my choosing, which soon gives way to eyelid twitching as the muscles lose all semblance of coordination or control of themselves. The whole shebang only lasts about half an hour, just because something that malicious can't possibly continue any further without alerting UN Relief Aid. As it stands, I can't recall a more intense musical experience.

After all that, I've got to hand it to the schedulers for jimmying with the itinerary by breaking up the noisemakers and inserting Tujiko Noriko. She shares little with her labelmates, and if it weren't for the odd grumbling and growling underneath her wistful singing and lullaby melodies, I'd think she'd taken a wrong turn heading to the Morr Music label showcase. The typical Mutek performer moves feet, most of this afternoon’s crew moves bowels, but Noriko is that rare performer at an electronic music festival that moves hearts. She's a plugged-in Chopin yearning for the aural equivalent of the twinkling stars while cooing at them in a cuddly Japanese/English hybrid word form that probably doesn't make much sense in either language. She's extolled with impassioned applause that really seems to embarrass her.

A room full of emotionally exhausted people greets Hecker with a silent sitting ovation, and he quickly sets out on his mission to remind everyone that nursery school is over and Mego is not a label for those with high blood pressure. His opening salvo is a buzzing akin to a swarm of bees being stomped on and then churned up by a giant turbine. This leads into earache-inducing squalls of electronic mercilessness. Oh my.

The afternoon is turning into an endurance contest, but nearly everyone is gutting it out until the very end because local talent David Kristian is playing. I remember when Montreal techno meant David Kristian, not Montreal Smoked Meat. And now, the present Montreal sound has completely circumvented him, that is, they have almost nothing in common and have developed independent of each other. This is not such a big surprise, since Kristian’s leanings always fell more into the "other" Montreal sound, i.e. those of the ambient and experimental camps. Pleasing the dance floors has never been his principal focus. Showcasing his brand new digital-based sound as Gentle Bakemono, he opens with beautiful drifting ambient followed by his old familiar sounding material. Except that it's digital, I guess. Since the hub of the Montreal techno scene excludes him, Kristian's been overlooked as of late. But he hasn't been left behind. 37:06.

Lest anybody think that this year's edition of Mutek has been flawless, let me vent some gripes right now. First, there is the Mutek 2003 compilation. I have to give them props for promoting the lesser known talent by including their tracks on the CD. It'd be easy to license Richie Hawtin, Pole, and Senor Coconut tracks and sell it on the strength of those big guns, even though there are a billion other compilations featuring those artists. However, every year I come here and listen to an amazing mixture of different music's, and yet every year the Mutek compilation sounds EXACTLY the same. Every year, it feels trapped in Pole circa 1998 chillout mode, although my perception may be skewed from always hearing the same few low-key tracks that are played as background music between sets at all the concerts. There are always a few Pole-esque dub tracks, a few drifting ambient tracks, a token minimal stomper, and a couple of electro-ish throwback tracks. This blueprint is fine if you’re preserving a "Mutek sound" for posterity, but if I was trying to communicate what I'd heard to an outsider, it's not a very representative soundtrack.

Last year there were always huge selections of CD's available at most of the gigs. A veritable mini-store was set up in the lounge at SAT, and it was convenient for not only finding the discs by all of the artists at the festival (plus music from related artists and labels who weren’t there), but it made for a fine distraction when one needed a break from the live shows on the other side of the curtain. But this year, there was no mini-shop, and even finding music from this year's performers was unpredictable. Coil CD's appeared and disappeared without any rhyme, reason, or warning. Mego and +8 rocked Montreal's world with their respective label showcases, but you wouldn’t know it from the CD table because there wasn’t anything to buy! Who is at fault here? The labels, for not choosing these gigs as a platform for shifting some extra product? The venues, for not supplying ample display space? Who?

Mutek representatives are constantly making the rounds asking people to fill out a survey. It's the ordinary "what did you like most/least", "what would you like to see next year" fare. I've been asked to complete the survey in the past, but this year I wasn't. And it's not like I never happened to run into the survey people at any point during the five days. There were a few occasions in which I'd be sitting near a bunch of other random people and one of them would be asked instead of me! I am grateful that there was no awkward eye contact followed by this sort of rejection, but that's of limited solace. What, am I suddenly no longer "Mutek material"? Am I too old for Mutek? Do I no longer match the profile of what Mutek fans should aspire to be? Christ, people come up to me and ask me stuff all the time, and it doesn't even matter which city I'm in. I'm the most approachable stranger I know. In the last few days, besides being asked for spare change at all hours of the day and night, I've been asked for directions, rolling papers, and was even approached at three in the morning by two attractive young women inquiring about the location of the nearest 24-hour strip club. When it comes to approachability, I'm a magnet, except at Mutek, apparently.

Finally, they've had a distinct problem keeping things running on time this year. In previous years, if the start time was called for 9:00 and you showed up at 9:05, then you'd missed four and a half minutes of music. This year almost every gig has started more than fifteen minutes late. I believe this is mainly due to soundchecks running longer than expected, but why is this so? Today, there was only a couple of hours in between the afternoon and the evening sessions at Station, and soundchecking the colossal Narod Niki can only be rushed by so much, but why book such a quandary in the first place? Why not start the afternoon session earlier, or the evening one later, or book them in separate venues? Thus, the comely Robin Judge re-starts the M-clock at 10:36 PM, at long last. Clearly influenced by the m-nus crew (i.e. Theorem), she gets the event underway for a jam-packed Station that's jacked up for the long haul. Following her, Monolake is simply awesome tonight. He begins by featuring lolloping dubby hip hop with swirling atmospherics. Then he moves on with his signature older style of galloping techno with swirling atmospherics. It's mayhem on the dance floor for all these bpm's and on most nights; this would have easily passed for a headlining performance. But tonight there's more. There's Mambotur caning the Latin-tech sound I'd expected from last year's finale (but received straight techno instead). I can't be bothered to pay attention to anyone combining techno elements with vocals and Latin polyrhythms, but this is an exception. The slick, deep, classic house beats keep me hooked for an hour.

Last year, the closing jam was the dessert. Most people didn’t bother to stay to eat their entire dessert. This year is nothing like that -- the masses turned out to see Narod Niki. The sight of their gear alone is worth the price of admission. The tables are arranged in a semicircle spanning the entire stage, with eight laptops, several mixers and a mind-blowing array of flashing lights fashioning a postcard-worthy view. The front of the stage is mobbed, and on all four sides of the second floor, people are leaning intently over the railing to get a better view. It's like something out of an AC/DC video. Messrs. Villalobos, Zip, Dandy Jack, Cabanne, Leclair, Nicolet, Bell, and Hawtin file onstage one by one, as flashbulbs go off constantly until they are all onstage about twenty minutes in.

From the names involved, I'm sure you can guess what it sounds like. If you've never heard of any of these guys, I can't imagine that you'd have read this far. Otherwise, you'll be able to imagine what each guy is likely to equally contribute to a group effort such as this. At four in the morning, the dance floor is still packed, shows no signs of emptying, and Narod Niki show no signs of tiring. A curfew forces Mutek to come to an anticlimactic conclusion, but not before Narod Niki receive an eight-minute ovation encouraging them to break the law and continue further. On stage, they're all hugging as though they're coming off stage at Wembley Stadium. An ignominious ending, but it's magic nonetheless. 42:45.

END. This is the point where I usually state some grand conclusion about the last few days and the morals we have learned from this extended episode of "Mutek: Behind the Music" where the pattern, as is the usual in these VH1 shows, went from great success to impending destruction due to house music infiltration crises and/or the lack of decent techno, only to be rescued from the brink by Captain Technoman and his band of Merry Popsters so that we all can live happily ever after and feel peachy inside until next year's festival.

I'm not doing any of that this year. There isn't any need for it. The scheduling was executed perfectly to avoid awkward genre clashes. And yet it wasn't just purist event after purist event. Saturday night was an appropriate microcosm of the whole. There were different styles of music, but there was something for everybody. There was a marquee headliner that everyone was anxious to see, and the crowd came prepared to see them and to have a good time before and after seeing them. Whether it was an afternoon of white noise or a late night of dubbing out, everybody who paid their money for the event got exactly what they wanted. In that sense, I can’t imagine the fourth edition of Mutek succeeding any better than it did.

And I'm reminded of a story involving Brian Wilson. When informed that Paul McCartney had considered "God Only Knows" to be the greatest song ever written, Brian just sunk deeper into depression, self-doubt, and drug abuse. Because if "God Only Knows" was the greatest song ever, then it stood to reason that he'd never write a better tune, and therefore he really was washed up like people were saying. And there's a sobering thought that won't leave my mind -- when you’re in a relationship, and it's so incredibly good, and you're as wildly happy as this, aren't you due for a letdown someday? Your partner's nagging or annoying or destructive faults will eventually bubble to the surface, won't they? If it can’t possibly get any better than this, then it won't. Right?