Saturday, May 31, 2003

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.

Friday, May 30, 2003

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.

Thursday, May 29, 2003

One step inside Universite de Quebec a Montreal's Design Building, and you know it's not, say, a chemistry building. Large glass doors open into a lobby, which wraps around a majestic staircase. Stark white pipes crisscross below the ceiling and the walls are a uniform, yet bold colour of grey. In the actual space where the panels are held, speakers are set up around the room and are blaring the Mutek 2003 CD before the sessions.

Today's topic is "(Re)Defining Distribution: Roles and Challenges in a Changing Market". We’re trying to tackle the reasons behind the decline in music sales and whether distributors can do anything to reverse the trends. I feel as though there’s an unspoken reasoning, namely the internet and "illegal" file sharing, that's on people's lips but not verbalized. It's probably a combination of trying to keep the conversation rooted in distribution issues, and knowing there's another panel discussion tomorrow tackling the internet issue (which I plan on attending).

There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Michael Bull (Caroline) thinks that cross-pollination of ideas and styles is key. For instance, he believes that electronic musicians can learn a lot from the punk scene by touring like them, i.e. get on the road, do everything on the cheap, all while getting your name out and effectively distributing and publicizing yourself. Sigy Zahn (Neuton) also believes that genre mixing is key and blames record labels for being ignorant of basic business procedures.

When it comes to spending, many labels and distributors think that throwing money at a record is a good strategy, which Paul Raymer (Fusion III) and Jeorg Heidemann (Universal Germany) dismiss as patently false. They explain that not only can distributors completely miss the boat and push a record in the wrong market, but also a record can be overpushed and not recoup in proportion to the expenditure. That is, suppose you were to spend 'x' dollars pushing a record, and it sold 'y' copies. Distributors who had falsely read their intended markets could then assume that if '2x' dollars were spent pushing the record, then you were sure to sell '2y' copies or even more. If they went through with the extra push, and the record sold 1.3'y' instead, it may be viewed as a failure (relatively speaking) given the expenditure. I gained tremendous respect for people who need to deal with these multivariable problems each and every day.

I detected a feeling of superiority from the panel toward labels, basically echoing Sigy's comments that labels are prone to screwing up while the distributors do an amazing amount of multitasking. Of course they're a bit biased toward themselves, as anyone would be, but I'm strongly inclined to agree with their viewpoints. Not only must distributors have an intimate knowledge of the actual music, but also it’s essential that they not become sloppy with their business. Labels can, and do get by without the latter (and some might argue they can also survive without the former) but there's just no way a distribution company could possibly stay afloat through ignorance because they're constantly spending money weeks or months before they see any money themselves. You just can’t spend money on publicity, buying from labels, shipping to sellers, and stay afloat while waiting weeks or months for payment from the sellers unless you're running an extremely tight ship in all aspects of business.

Things get more heated when the discussion turns to pricing issues, and dissent from the audience follows. Paul flatly states that pricing is not an issue, and even claims that prices aren't high enough. He believes that it all comes down to simple supply and demand, that is, if there's a record that people really want and it's distributed properly, then they'll pay good money for it. From the floor, someone asks why the price of the music is going up when the cost of making it (due to the proliferation of bedroom producers and labels) is going down. He responds by saying that this logic is misleading and reminds everyone that no matter how the music is recorded, there's still a lot of middle men between the performer and the consumer, all of whom need to get paid.

I agree that the path from artist to consumer is far more complex than most people (certainly not distributors) realize. However, don't rock labels rely on the same middlemen? Korn's label wouldn't spend a cool couple of million to make the record plus a few videos without a plan to recoup somehow, would they? If a record can be made for ten grand instead of a thousand grand, you've got to win somewhere on the food chain, don't you?

But regardless, today's discussion rarely strayed from the need for distributors (or distributors and labels together) to do better business. There wasn't much about the need to do different kinds of business. Everyone would prefer to function as normal and ensure that everybody gets paid according to existing practices. A drastic shift in the very nature of distribution, such as legal or "illegal" downloading, wasn't really considered. There is the notion of mp3's not having much effect on electronic music sales because they cater to a "fringe" market. Only Jon Berry (Force Inc., and the moderator for the panel) spoke up and claimed he strongly disagreed with this viewpoint. The irony is that significant shifts in the music business have indeed been taking place over the last few years, and most people don’t realize it.

I have written previously concerning the loss of the CD's "mystique" due to the recent commonality of CD burning technology. This is a potential cause of the decline in music sales, but it is not the symptom. Large chains probably don't think about it along those lines, but they do know that these causes, whatever they are, are hurting their bottom line. They are quite good at figuring out how to improve their bottom line, and they have done so by switching their attention to DVD sales. This aspect of their business was recognized in today's discussion, but its significance was not emphasized. Think about it: HMV has an eighty year history of selling MUSIC, and they've now turned over half their stores' floor space to the sale of MOVIES, and they've accomplished this change in only a few short years. How much more drastic can you get than turning over your inventory to focus on an entirely different product?

Another huge shift has already taken place in the electronic music community itself. Everybody merely takes it for granted, but its importance cannot be overstated. Essentially, it is widely understood that a full-time job is necessary to sustain most careers in these genres of music. In even simpler terms -- they understand that you (often) can't make a living solely from a career in electronic music. Getting signed to a major label and spending a life indulging in a life of debauchery is the ideal for 99.9% of rock bands. It's the accepted path to becoming a big star in the genre. I don’t believe such romanticized notions exist in (most) electronic music genres. The expectation is they'll never make enough to completely sustain themselves through musical endeavours. Multitasking via a combination of producing, remixing, DJ'ing, and running a record label is practically universal. It’s not uncommon in the hip-hop world, but both hip-hop and electronic music operate a world apart from the rock business. How many rock bands also run a record label and hold down a full-time career/day job? How many rock producers work as DJ's on occasion?

For thousands of years of history, listening to music meant going someplace and hearing it played live. The era of recorded music, and the era of making a living solely through recorded music and never playing live, covers a drastically shorter time span. Perhaps that era is coming to an end. Perhaps recordings will become worthless (i.e. not profitable) and live performance will reassume primary importance. 6:59.

Station looks exactly the same as it did last night, even though it's only five in the afternoon. Dark red lights and no sun. I miss SAT. I miss the lounge in front when you walked in, the sun shining in the large plate windows, the passersby peering inside, curious about the strange noises from within. That happy hour vibe is gone. But I keep a book handy anyhow.

While watching Samiland from a comfortable chair in the balcony, I realize the drawback of attending a festival assembled for my benefit. There’s a persistent nagging feeling that there’s nothing I'm hearing that I haven’t heard before. In this case, it's lush chords, sparse beats, clicks. Check, check, check. They earn a big gold star for sampling Mutek itself with their final track. It's the opening chords of Closer Musik's 2001 performance of "One, Two, Three, No Gravity" (complete with crowd noise) laid over a basic hip-hop backbeat. It's their least complex track and is also their most beautiful.

Then I get what's been missing from the "experimental" performances thus far -- a little noise in the system. Diane Labrosse and Aime Dontigny project sampled clanging and banging and knocking over the system, subjecting us all to their obvious love of analog sounds. It's a refreshing change in this overtly digital festival. It likely wouldn’t shock anyone unfamiliar with electroacoustic or noise music (Labrosse and Dontigny's usual MO's, respectively), but the same cannot be said for morceaux_de_machines, who dispense completely with politeness and head straight for the death noise jugular a la Merzbow or Brighter Death Now. While processing voices and other industrial sounds, they create a blazing array of chaos. They keep rubbing a thin metal strip to produce some of these not-of-this-world sounds. Later, I find out how this works -- the sound is moisture-dependent. You can feed it water by dipping it in a glass or sprinkling liquid on its surface. It can even detect the slight changes in moisture content just by waving it around in the open air. Here's my open question for rock purists. Why? Why stick to guitars when you could also be playing cool shit like this?

And finally, an hour after I feared I'd heard everything before, Coin Gutter reassure me that it's not the case. They are completely unpredictable -- serene one moment, crashing noise the next. Things will be floating along nicely and then I'll lose focus for a couple of minutes and notice there's a mountain of noise slapping me to attention. Beauty, roughness, serenity, nastiness -- No Type covered all of it effectively, but only Coin Gutter covered all of it at once. 9:14.

At first, I'm not taken with Mylena Bergeron’s churning and humming. But the liberal use of processed voices and the other ghostly sounds prove to be a grower. The duo Reconnaissance seem to pick up where Kontakt der Junglinge left off last night, with tense, high-pitched tones of the barely audible variety. The glacial progress last night was more cold and uninviting, but this stuff is more complex, with more twitching to keep you conscious, plus the sweeping lines and vibrating grids on the video screen help sustain alertness. Then, after a couple of exercises in sound/visual synchronization by 242 Pilots, it launches into their improvised visual accompaniment with Tim Hecker. He's dead-on awesome, combining noise and splendour while holding the room in his own personal trance. Actually, the whole evening's been like that, resulting in three of the fastest hours I've ever spent watching music.

The M-clock stops for ten minutes while I walk to Metropolis, and while walking I prepare for the transition to a room of Coil fans. As expected, the floor of the venue is black hell. All the seats in the balcony are the same, it's a sheet of black hell draped over stadium seating. In the midst of all this, Coil come on stage wearing white furry jumpsuits. They begin to play, although there's not much distinguishing them from all the electroacoustic stuff I've been hearing all day. Of course, Coil were years ahead of their time and influenced countless other bands. They were ahead in real time, but lagged in festival scheduling time. Obviously they’re deserving of the reverence in the air.

Philipp Quehenberger has the unenviable task of following this. For the first few minutes, people are still buzzing and milling about in front of the stage, seemingly oblivious that the poor guy is even playing. The written programme accentuates his youth -- born in 1977 along with the worldwide punk explosion -- so he's young enough to have idolized Chemical Brothers and therefore those big beats populate his set. He also goes psycho on a keyboard, playing manic lines akin to a farfisa on amphetamines. It's brash, tough, and carries the added bonus of clearing out the diehard Coil fans in time for those who want the dance floor to themselves to party with T. Raumschmiere. He’s a scruffy, lanky, tattooed freak who wouldn’t look out of place sitting on a street corner asking for change accompanied by a dog and a leather jacket. He does inhumane things to a defenseless MIDI keyboard, walks all over his table, drops chunky beat after chunky beat and gets the now quarter-full venue frenzied up nice and good. And plays the first encore of the week. 15:14.

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

JUNE 2002. As much as I've enjoyed the last two years of Mutek, I'm not sure I can justify the time and expense spent by hauling ass to Montreal, that fabulous and eclectic city nonetheless, and continuing to frequent a festival whose direction seems to be diverging from my personal expectations for it. Well, that's unfair, Mutek is what it is, and nobody, least of all a complete bum like myself, should complain that it doesn't develop and evolve according to my pussy little whims. Mutek, you and I have had an entertaining relationship over the last two year, and not unlike interpersonal relationships, sometimes you just don't want to hang out as much as you used to. I still like you, I like you a lot, oh to hell with it, I probably even love you goshdarnit but I don't think I can go on with this for my priorities have changed and there's other places I want to go and other ways I think I'd rather spend my money, but it's not like the money I spent on you was misplaced, I just think I should stop with it for a while. We'll still be cordial, of course, we'll still be friends. Basically, and I mean this in the most sincere manner, it's not you, Mutek, it's me. I don't feel comfortable at your huge club nights. Yeah, I enjoy them, but not in a travel 550 km sort of way. Your artist are top notch at what they do, they're definitely swell and all that, but what they do isn't necessarily the stuff I want and need. You're a lot of fun, but there's nothing you've shown me that I would have been sorely disappointed about not getting to see before I die, nothing that would have haunted me had I missed, like that feeling of utter emptiness I had when I arrived at Lollapalooza and all the Nine Inch Nails shirts were gone or when the Stone Roses tickets sold out and I was second next line. That was some serious heartbreak. Anyway, I can't pretend to be dancing out there with club-going people and pretending that everything is happy smiley OK when in truth I need more experimental music and minimal techno. Maybe avant-garde festivals are the answers, maybe it's Toronto's Ambient Ping nights, I don't know I'm confused and you can't be easily replaced not by a long shot but I feel I need the change. You won't miss me, you have loads of people who care about you more and appreciate what you're doing a hell of a lot more than I do, it'll be better this way.

APRIL 2003. Holy fuck. OK, we're back on. We're back on, and I'm sorry. We're back on, and I'm sorry for what I said and I won't ever say it again. We're back on, and I'll do anything you want. At the end of May 2003, I am ALL YOURS.

This years Mutek lineup is easily, EASILY, the best in the festival's brief four-year history. The lineup goes beyond eclectic, way past jaw-dropping and all the way around to choking-on-your-own-tongue shocking. There's showcases for contemporary labels that I love (Mego, M-nus), legends (Coil, Hawtin), and stuff you'll never see elsewhere ever again (Senor Coconut). Experimental noise, techno, screwed up nasty shit with turntables -- it's all there, and it's all good. Or perhaps I should say, everything there will be stuff I like, and it's all good as far as I'm concerned. It's so nice when someone cares about you so much that they'll go to such extreme lengths to make you happy. To organize a festival with my best interests placed first and foremost. IT'S ALL MINE! Now all I have to do is forget about all my important responsibilities and have fun. TAKE ME, MUTEK, TAKE ME!

MAY 28, 2003. I am so excited to be in Montreal. I love this city. Every Torontonian loves Toronto but loves another Canadian city even more. But I've never met anyone from outside Toronto who said that Toronto was their favourite city.

At this year's festival I am debuting the Mutek clock. Don't worry, you will come to understand what it is, and you will crave it. We need a snappy name for the Mutek clock. I'm working on it.

With an afternoon to kill, my thoughts turn to the usual: shopping. As is customary for my visits to Montreal, the first stop is Cheap Thrills. It’s like the She Said Boom franchise in Toronto, with the combination of music/books thing going on, except with a far better CD selection. The used bin of electronic CDs contains literally thirty discs from my collection, which is both cool and disheartening at the same time. As diabolical as ever, the Rue Metcalfe shop sucks my money from my bank account with wicked aplomb and leaves me with four CDs as a parting gift. One of them is an Asmus Tiechens album. I have a strong feeling that he and Thomas Koner will be awesome tonight and I’ll end up wanting to buy some of his work.

I pick up a Mutek flyer at Cheap Thrills and pore over it. Every time I glance over the schedule I grow more and more amazed with its awesomeness. Does anyone know the identities of the Narod Niki collective? Is this going to be the Mystery Theatre portion of our festival program? Will it be kept a surprise until the very end?

Still killing time, I read over the Mutek_intersection topics. At first, I was mildly upset when I got word that an admission charge would apply to these panels. Then I came to my senses. As anyone who has attended an academic conference can tell you, published research may be public domain, but gathering together a large group of experts in the field is an incredibly powerful resource. So much music, so many people, so much opportunity for face-to-face interaction -- any serious scholar would, nay should pay good money and travel long distances to take part in this concentrated five day overload. This is exactly the reasoning behind the Mutek professional accreditation that was introduced this year. This academic element of the festival can be nothing but good for its image.

Finally, I go to Ex-Centris for the first set of shows. In the festival booklet/programme, the word "minimal" or "minimalism" seems to appear a thousand times. There hasn’t been a written document that had this kind of a hard-on for a particular word since Mr. Garrisson's Great American Romance Novel on "South Park". And the beans have been spilled over the identities of Narod Niki. It's right there in black and white, their first names anyway. I guess I won’t be sleeping on Sunday night. And what's with the festival "overture" at five this afternoon? So I've missed something already? And where's the bar this year? I'm not sure which of these upsets me more. Only minutes later, it's all forgotten because they've laid down padded mats, which makes all the comfort difference in the world while sitting for two hours on Ex-Centris' immaculate hardwood.

And the Mutek clock starts at 8:57. 0:00.

The many fantastic visual displays were big highlights of last year’s festival. And this time, we start with another real goody. Christof Migone's music is nothing too remarkable. It's one long piece which resembles Monolake's "Gobi" e.p., but clangier. But the visuals -- all are films done in one take -- make the performance. One is a view out the window of (what appears to be) the Victoria and Champlain bridges, while a man with headphones sits near the sill facing outside. It really doesn't matter the exact location of the shot, what's important is that the sun is going down, which serves as the tacit reminder of the amount of time that is passing during the uncomfortable moments during this half-hour. Another shot is a close-up of a wide-open mouth. A recent trip to the dentist serves as the tacit reminder of the difficulty of maintaining such a pose as time passes during the uncomfortable moments during this half-hour. The strangest shot of all is another mouth close-up, this one of a man (also the one with the open mouth) biting into a tomato that is partially encased in ice. The ice is slowly melting, which serves as a tacit reminder of the amount of time that is passing during the uncomfortable moments during this half hour. For the first five minutes, I'm not paying close attention to the screens, only to the music. Then I notice subtle changes -- the drying of the lips, quivering of the mouth, the loss of texture on the surface of the melting ice. Ten minutes in and I'm feeling sorry for these guys and their unenviable situations. I’m starting to empathize. It's starting to get painful for me. Fifteen minutes in and the mouth is struggling to stay open. The bite on the tomato needs to be adjusted with greater frequency. Twenty minutes in and it’s getting very hard to keep watching. The mouth is twitching nervously. Froth is forming around the tomato and red-coloured spittle dribbles from the edges of the fruit and onto the ice. Twenty-five minutes in. A pool of saliva lies in the lower jaw. He's having trouble holding on to the tomato. It's falling apart and he's frothing more. Please let it end. End this pain. I'm serious. The sound around me is crackling and thumping, yet these guys suffer in silence. Thirty minutes. It's felt like a week. Mouth is shaking. Tongue is dried up and white. Remaining ice melts and falls away, leaving only the mushy tomato.

The mouth closes, finally. He finally spits out the tomato and red goo covers his mouth and chin. It's done. And that, my friends, is how you combine music and visuals to create an unbearable tension that is far greater than the sum of the two component parts.

Clinker has a tough act to follow, and thus he's good but unspectacular. The bright colours and simple patterns in the video and the drifting drones and hums of the audio recall Stephan Mathieu's set from last year, although Mathieu's more methodical pace is far more my preference with this type of music.

Asmus Tiechens indeed looks like a mentor. He looks very professorly with his glasses and scruffy suit. Kontakt der Junglinge begins as a quiet roar, much like the sound of the wind swirling outside in the alley mere moments before the onset of a major storm. It gently pulsates, rendering most in the room transfixed, even comatose. There's a blank screen behind them. Blank stares and persons lying down on their mats are common. There's nothing to watch except two men sitting intently before a table. There's nothing to watch except them. Nobody moves. I don't detect any real pattern to this, it can end at any time, which seems appropriate because this isn't really a gig. It's become a state of being. When it does finish it immediately receives a rapturous reception. While walking to Station, I stop at Tim Hortons for a donut to replace the blood sugar that Koner and Tiechens have withdrawn from me.

I find no need to halt the M-clock for the one block walk. Besides, the state of being that was Kontakt der Junglinge effectively continued until I consumed the donut. I have my doubts about Station. It feels like a dimly lit nightclub despite the bold red brick and has a strong, booming sound system. The layout in SAT -- enclosing the stage in the center of the venue -- was so atypical that I rarely felt that I was attending "just another gig". The crowd here seems like a complete turnover from the bunch from Ex-Centris. There are clubbers and crusties (what do you expect, it's dub night) and they all seem to be moving in fast-forward. It must be a residual effect from the static stuff I just heard at Ex-Centris.

Why do so many acts sound like Boards of Canada these days? I’ve heard many good things about Telefon Tel Aviv but I'll have forgotten about a beefier BoC in a couple weeks time. Speaking of acts that have been copied by a billion others, Pole's new material has been described as a departure from the sound that spawned dozens of imitators. On the basis of tonight's showing, it's brighter and far less claustrophobic, but it's unmistakably him. The addition of rapper Fat Jon is a great touch, which adds to, the more organic feel of the tunes. Pole's no longer trapped himself in his damp basement, he's dubbing out on the front porch instead. What a lead-in for Deadbeat, whose latest work is very classic dub, but has maintained barely enough crackle and hum in the mix to ensure a connection with his early work. Otherwise, this is no-nonsense dub bliss, kicking it old school. 5:12.

I walk by SAT on my way home, just for old time's sake. The inside is in ruins. Junk is scattered all over. Graffiti is all over the outside.

Monday, May 26, 2003

"Please Kill Me", by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, is a fascinating, not to mention depressing read. The endlessly entertaining stories are fascinating and lose little of their sparkle when read and reread. But the (predictable?) crash and burn of many of the book's lead voices, ending in burnout and/or death, is a depressing (but realistic) conclusion to the volume.

As editors, McNeil and McCain did an incredible job of culling together interviews from dozens of characters and constructing a cohesive, nearly linear narrative of events. Many times, a story is told by more than one person. The story is "begun" by one person and "continued" by another corroborating voice, reading almost like a talkshow transcript even though the interviews likely took place months or years apart. Of course, with such editorial savvy comes the power to focus on events and people that the authors find crucial. Using my limited writing savvy, I just labeled the editors as "biased". But they certainly should be, because this is an "Oral History of Punk", and what's history without a biased viewpoint. After all, they were there, so I certainly have an interest in their bias.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to have issue with some of the books' slants. The beginnings of punk in NYC is the main focus, but English punk is plainly labeled as an ugly warping of the original punk aesthetic. McNeil himself, "resident punk" of the original "Punk" magazine, calls his own number and delivers a diatribe against English punk. Firstly, "punk" is just a four-letter word, it's just a label, and nobody owns it. Was NYC punk different from English punk? Absolutely. So what? Is Detroit techno different from English techno? Absolutely. So what? Techno evolved as more people were exposed to it, that's how music works. English punk was more than just spiked hair, safety pins, and gobbing (the trademark punk stereotypes that prevailed throughout the 80's, and are still around somewhat even today). Many of the American principals came from middle class backgrounds, and got involved in the scene because they were bored of their parents suburban lifestyles. Many of the English principals came from working class backgrounds (save the Clash), and fell in with punk not because of boredom, but because it was a distraction from the inevitability of a life on the dole. The English may have blatantly copped their looks from Richard Hell and his ratty t-shirts, but the scene's origins and motivations go far beyond mere idol worship. John Lydon understood this -- he noted that punk is not music for the over-privileged, as did his slumming blue-collar American counterparts when they remade the music in their own image, called it grunge, and dominated the world with it.

There's also the prevalence of incredible debauchery, particularly with respect to drugs. A cynical person might say that the drugs are glamourized in this book, but the last sixty pages or so are centred on the deaths of noted drug abusers Sid Vicious, Stiv Bators, Johnny Thunders, Nico, and many more. "Please Kill Me", in words only, is neutral with respect to the debauchery, and it rarely judges anybody. I believe the editors feel that the book's ending serves as the implicit finger wagging that no direct warnings could easily say. Thus, the focus is on the outrageousness, and other less "colourful" characters (i.e. Blondie, Talking Heads, and wot, only one mention of Suicide??) are practically ignored. However, these stories are often hilariously funny, and although some of them will be known to keen fans, I can't imagine anybody not discovering new gems from reading this book.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

I started watching "American Idol" six weeks ago. At that time, I figured it was self-evident that Clay would win. I still believe he *should* win, but it's close enough to go either way and I won't be upset if Ruben takes the title. The "trouble" with Clay is that even the judges don't appreciate how good he is. That's because his delivery, or "American Idol: The Musical" as Simon Cowell would put it, falls well outside the conventional boundaries of contemporary pop. Say what you want about Ruben and Kimberly having nice voices, but they have nice R&B voices, R&B voices will slot effortlessly into contemporary R&B radio fodder. Thus, the judges completely missed the boat with Clay's rendition of "Here, There and Everywhere" on last night's program. Sure, it's a "safe" song in that it doesn't pose many vocal challenges -- unless you're Clay Aiken and you're forced to drastically change your histrionic style to avoid overwhelming a touching, petite Beatles number. Compare with Ruben's "Imagine" -- he just sang it in his usual R&B manner.

The roles were somewhat reversed with their final numbers. Ruben's "Flying Without Wings" was a midtempo singalong joy, whereas Clay's jarring "Bridge Over Troubled Water" was an impressive vocal display, but it was a mess. Everything, from the misappropriate use of the gospel choir to the annoying way he sang the word "water", made for a performance so white-bread soulless that it couldn't have been any more honky had Pat Boone himself sung it.

Clay should still win, though. With some tweaking, he can be the new Marc Almond.

Monday, May 12, 2003

Last August 18, I wrote about forming a band. Nothing resembling that band has come to fruition, and I wasn't expecting it to. It was mainly a paean to "music I'd like to make, somewhere and sometime". It's good to get these things down on e-paper for posterity, so I can at least look back on it and think of what a great idea I have and aren't I a musical voyeur and supergenius for thinking of it, etc.

Then I stumbled across a CD by the Wharton Tiers Ensemble whose back cover clearly stated "five guitars, bass, sax, drums". The CD is called "Twilight of the Computer Age", I gave it a spin, and whaddaya know, it's filled with pounding drone rock and spacey semi-improvised FX pieces. It's times like this when one realizes there is no justice in the world and all the best ideas are truly taken. I should have expected this. I've heard that Lee Ranaldo had a project with 16 guitars and one hi-hat. If true, similar ensembles of guitar excess must surely be out there, so my idea couldn't have been as unique as I'd hoped. Coming from Tiers, who has been a figure on the NYC underground scene for twenty years and has worked with the likes of Sonic Youth, Helmet and Dinosaur Jr (but I hadn't heard of him until today).

The recording featured some strong guitar sounds but I found it ultimately lacking. Much like the Warlocks' recordings, it's an album loaded with guitar and is quite good, but disappointing in the sense that I'd expect an album with that many guitars to sound, you know, a hell of a lot HUGER. I can't even begin to imagine the technical difficulties in recording a large ensemble while not bleeding the tracks into another, but nonetheless, I need a bit more bang for my five guitar buck.

Next, I listened to "The Orbit of Eternal Grace" by Grasshopper and the Golden Crickets, a side project by the Mercury Rev guitarist. And whaddaya know, it's filled with loads of the wide-eyed psych-folk you'd expect from Mercury Rev, but with oodles of tape loops, moogs, shimmery noises, flutes, and about a million other things, all vying for your ears attention at the same time. Sometimes you find your Wall of Sound in unexpected places.