A non-routine update in the middle of the night in a laser lab while basking in the marvelousness of Bardo Pond's new album "On the Ellipse". People aged sixteen and under should not be allowed to record and release music. It should be a law, like the driving age or the age of majority. I decided this while watching (the otherwise enjoyable) MTV Europe, during the video for "Everybody Cha Cha" by Cecil, Johnny and Caro (sp? Does it matter? Who cares? I don't). There's not a single piece of music made by a sub-sixteener that isn't watered down from the norm. So why create it in the first place? To provide crushes for eight year old girls whose older brothers have ugly friends? In this case, the three brats and their music label sugar daddies were peddling a watered down hip-hop latin boy-band hybrid. Music can't get any more watered down than that. That's like going to your nearest student trashy pub hangout bar slum hall (where the beer is already watered down, obviously), drinking seven beers, holding out on breaking the seal, and finally pissing into your eighth beer to water it down even more.

Now that's watered down.

I spent part of last Saturday looking for the Tresor shop in Berlin. I was armed with an address I'd found on Mapquest, and went to that address and found ... nothing. An office/apartment building, but no shop. Having been to the Hard Wax shop already, I figured I could outsmart this problem, so I started walking down all the alleys on the block, searching for the hidden entrance. Still nothing. Eventually I had to admit defeat. Does this shop still exist? Is it a real shop or just an office? A secret door underneath a manhole? Anyone?

On the way back home, I settled for wandering around the grounds of the hallowed club itself. Not inside, just the grounds, which were strewn with empty cups and the remainders of a beer tent, no doubt the remnants of a fine Friday night. The club is but a few hundred metres east of the former wall, and thus the exterior of the building has all the charm you'd expect -- a Soviet-era decaying concrete crumbler. When the club opened in 1991, it fit in quite well with the surroundings, no doubt. But Leipziger Strasse in 2003 has been drastically overhauled. With shiny office buildings lining the block, it now boasts a shiny financial district feel. The decades old building that houses Tresor is now very much out of place, as it rubs shoulders with modernity. It's a beautiful fly in the ointment.

More from Berlin ... so last Saturday, we took a day off from work, and went off to see the sights. And the first stop was -- the Brandenburg Gate? The Reichstag? No silly, it was the HARD WAX SHOP. As a tourist trap, it sure was difficult to find. It literally took ten minutes to find the entrance, which was way at the end of an alley behind a row of buildings. And I'm not talking about a narrow European street, this was an ALLEY, complete with shopping carts piled next to a rusty garage, drunkards, and the shop's name painted on the wall for identification purposes. Then one needs to walk up four flights of stairs in a building that could easily double as the setting for a drug bust scene in any cop movie of the last thirty years.

The shop itself isn't too large, but a third of its area is taken up by a wall, I mean literally a wall of massive speakers that were playing dub music at 1/100th of their volume capacity yet still comfortably loud. The records I bought were as much souvenirs as they are musical investments.

Continuing where I left off yesterday ... I packed my bags in about twenty minutes, right after I'd spent thirty packing my CD's. Of course, the music accompanying me on this trip would be predominantly German. The heavy hitters, i.e. Kraftwerk, Neu!, Vainqueur, Gas, Lou Reed's "Berlin", all came along for the ride. Without a proper system and speakers (only a discman), hearing music for the one waking hour I spent in my apartment each day (getting out of bed and preparing to return to it) was a bit of a chore. And with no sound card at work and a bike as my main mode of transportation, my interactions with music were limited to MTV Europe and a shockingly awesome German weather and events channel which shows live shots of various cities and resort locations while German oom-pah-pah muzak folk plays gently in the background. Very uppity in the morning, no joke. MTV Europe is shockingly awesome as well, with a maximum of music (a tasty mixture of pop and dance) and a minimum of talk.

I'm staying in Berlin for a three week working trip, and of course there's plenty to see and hear.

A little less than 24 hours before the plane took off, the trip began on a sour note. I'd remembered that the Love Parade takes place in Berlin during July, so I looked for the date, and sure enough, it was due to happen on the night before my arrival. I was disgusted -- this was a serious brainfart because I could have easily flown in a day earlier had I been more on top of things. It would have all been in place. My trip to Berlin : paid for through work. Work : nothing to do until Monday. One million crazy folk dancing to techno in the streets of Berlin : priceless. Then I had to go ahead and fly in twelve hours too late. Idiot. I suppose I could take solace in knowing that the music isn't so much techno as it is trance-rave-E-soaked-crud, but that would be missing the point and trashing the good name of the intangible communal experience that partying in a street with one million Germans and pissing in the bushes and getting with the moment and pretending to love a bunch of strangers, provides. Or was I just remembering being eighteen again? Without the bushes, of course. And the Germans. And the street. Otherwise ...

Buried within my Mutek musings was the true story (not to say that the rest of that Montreal trip was untruthful) of my search and find of Primal Scream's "Swastika Eyes" single. However, that crucially awesome item was in fact a distant second on my "to find" list. And after resolving my search for Number Two, the only rational follow-up was to conclude my search for Number One, without delay.

My Bloody Valentine. Loveless.

The problem: MBV were dropped by Creation almost immediately after the album's release. They are still (to the best of my knowledge) signed to Virgin, and their Creation recordings are now owned by Sony. Re-printing the album on vinyl is not a priority. Therefore, all existing vinyl copies were printed by the now-defunct Creation in 1991. After searching both North American coasts, I've concluded that hardly any of these copies are on this continent, either.

The solution: Ebay. A careful search and one damned fine deal later, Loveless was on its way from the UK and into my waiting hands. Typical auction prices for the record are between $40 and $50 USD. I paid a lot less. I'm Jewish, so I had to make sure everyone understands that.

The record: The outer sleeve is in good condition, the record itself is near pristine.

The sound: I'm used to hearing the occasional new things when listening to the album. Such is the complexity and density of the recording. But I'm not used to hearing several new things in one sitting.

Anyone who's a vinyl-phile or has read my musings on the vinyl vs CD sound quality debate (which of course, is a no-contest one-sided debate) knows what I'm about to write. CD: high frequencies = stifled, bass = sludgy. Vinyl: the coast is clear. But I was surprised by how much more of a ROCK record Loveless becomes on vinyl. The blended murkiness of the CD accentuates the swirling, other-worldly headspaces. On record, some of this fog is blown clear away, revealing actual strumming underneath the din. And the vocals, naturally, are sharper and more nuanced.

I didn't listen too carefully to "Only Shallow". It would be difficult to difficult to discern warped vinyl from actual sound with this track, so I just let it play. "Loomer" carries a strong kick, and "Touched" is "Touched". "To Here Knows When" peels away the layers and allows the soft percussion to peek through.

Then it's the heavy stuff, and the heavy revelations. The bass on "When You Sleep" is quaking, resonating and shaking the speakers. This is the magic of vinyl -- you can hear separation between guitars and bass, rather than the across-the-whole-track blanketing of the bass sounds on a CD. The concluding minutes of "I Only Said" are propelled forward by guitars that rev up every other bar like a Formula One car shifting gears at 150 mph. These accents and attacks are severely curtailed on the CD, and I took delight in playing the two formats simultaneously for the sake of the lopsided comparison. Then I played the end of "I Only Said" four times in a row and listened through headphones to marvel at its marvelousness.

"Come In Alone"'s bass is more quaking goodness, and "Sometimes" carries the same jump-out-of-the-speakers mid-fi kick that "Loomer" did. "Blown A Wish" features unexpected sublime twinkling cascades on top of it's existing expected sublime twinkling cascades. "What You What" is a snarling rocker, and "Soon"'s strumming (heretofore unnoticed and unappreciated by me) stands out.

MBV are certainly part of the Velvet Underground inner circle -- everyone who hears/heard them forms/formed a band. But with the first wave of Velvets adorers, at least they were hearing the record on vinyl rather than the awful mid-80's remastered version that stinks up shiny 5" discs worldwide. But with MBV "Loveless", so much of the inspiration and hero worship comes from people who haven't heard the vinyl. They're hearing a very different album. They're admiring something which only exists on CD, something that doesn't exist on vinyl, never existed in the studio, and never happened in live performance. Obviously, all this applies equally well to me as it does to countless others. And don't read this like I'm thumbing my nose at the ignorant masses, "I have the vinyl but you don't ha ha ha". I took a long look at my CD closet and tried to imagine how much I'm missing. How much better it could all sound.

Besides, a CD is what it is, and there's something to be said for it's heightened sensations of swirl and eddy. Some people might prefer this, and find the greater clarity of the vinyl less inspirational. Which is OK. But there's no denying that you can hear more things on a vinyl recording. Almost always, I'll prefer hearing to not hearing.

"Debut album on Chemikal Underground - recorded in the summer of 1997 in Hamilton with Paul Savage and Andy Miller. Regarded by many as Mogwai's best and by Mogwai themselves as their worst". -- tagline for "Young Team" in the online shop on Mogwai's official website.

As has become customary for a new Mogwai record, opinions are split between those who love it and those who love "Young Team". A distillation of the latter opinion goes as follows: "This is a pleasant album but it doesn't ruffle the feathers or offer the explosion of ideas like 'Young Team' did ... ". First of all, "Young Team" was three albums and six years ago, so get over it. I too was a bit taken back when Mogwai got quiet on record. Ah, 1999 was a good year. But I got over it, went with the flow, gradually understood what they were doing, and when I talk about their work now, I'm going to hold it up to their next most recent album, not their debut.

But at least the Mogwai critics and fans act this way consistently. Things could be worse, for instance, there's a wildly overrated British band who also released an acclaimed rock album in 1997. Subsequently, they released two very different albums, and both were similarly adored. These days, they've returned to their rock roots and released a record that would have been a natural follow up to their 1997 supposed masterpiece. Now, everyone wants to criticise it every which way. People see the new album's reversion to rock as a step backward, but still long for the old material, all while not clamouring to hear more of the recent material. Obviously, that doesn't leave this band with much room to move. It's a tough position for a band to be in. I might be moved to feel sorry for them as they face the backlash, however, when your singer claims that the mere sight of a guitar makes him sick and yet leads his band in a rock-oriented direction less than three years later, you're already a walking contradiction and can't blame your critics for being ones as well.

Back to the topic at hand -- I don't understand the reverence directed at "Young Team". It sounds like Slint and Arab Strap, whereas their next three albums all sound like Mogwai. That's not unusual career pattern for a young band trying to find itself, and it accounts for the spectrum of ideas tinkered with on the album. The band was also close to falling apart during that time, hence their disdain of the record as well as the splintered and unfocused tone of the ideas explored within. Plus, the whole "Young Team is loud but the other albums are quiet" argument doesn't make sense. For one, the album wasn't produced or mastered nearly as well as the others, so the tracks themselves are literally more quiet than on the successive albums. "Like Herod" and "Mogwai Fear Satan" are the loudest songs, filling up half the record, and they are 3/4 quiet. The latter is easily the best thing on the album, but every live version ever done blows it away like a gale disperses mist. And most of the other songs don't have any loud bits on them at all.

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?

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.

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.