- We can’t say the Mutek people kept the biggest names for Nocturnes 4, their last main event this year. I mean, the Modeselektor gig the previous night was probably the most crowdpleasing and populist moment of the festival. And, besides, Chloé, The Field and Danton Eeprom are basically considered newcomers on these shores, while local tech-house hero Mossa is still criminally overlooked in his own country. That said, the mixture of genres and sceneries presented this evening spawned what was probably one of the most stylistically satisfying events Mutek had to offer in 2008.
Displaying the rigorously self-effacing Kill the DJ ethos, Chloé got onstage at 11:00 casually dressed in an ample sweatshirt (her icy French gender-bending chav outfit was probably at the dry cleaner) and whispered her way through her live set, showcasing most of the tracks on her first long player for the Parisian imprint. That album’s mood was impeccably and impressively recreated: gentle, hypnotic head nodding to ‘Suspended’, for instance, was the perfect way to start the night. Sadly, she didn’t play the spooky ‘Be Kind to Me’, but nonetheless her performance was languorous, even lascivious at times, which is quite an achievement for a producer who made a name for herself with her androgynous yet frigid take on slo-mo French acidic house.
Mossa, on the other hand, probably felt the room was warmed enough already and didn’t bother with unnecessary preliminaries as a result. The abrupt change in tempo was warmly received by the avid dancers in attendance. Mossa’s craft lies in the blurring of lines between playing actual records, playing live (a digital drummer joined him half way through the set), and re-editing it all as they go along. Finishing it off? One of garage house’s most instantly recognizable moments, the quite gay yet always effervescent ‘Deep Inside’ by Hardrive from 1993. It was probably too much for some, but Mossa’s own evident enthusiasm in the last ten minutes of his set was nothing short of contagious.
I didn’t really know what to expect from The Field in a live context, to be honest. From Here We Go Sublime seems so bound to its studio-based execution it was hard to truly understand what the addition of a live guitarist/drummer was going to bring to the equation. At some point, a girl standing behind me that obviously didn’t have a clue as to who the group was told her friend the performance made her feel like listening to, er, Radiohead (which says a lot about the overall feel; it was more ‘Everything in its Right Place’ than ‘Love Is Stronger Than Pride’). Quirky samples, as on the album, were au gout du jour, this time having, for instance, the sweeter than sweet ‘Heartbeat’ vocals of Norwegian songstress Annie reverberating on top of ever-expanding psychedelic shoegazing techno. Set closer ‘Over the Ice’ was fairly impressive and quite euphoric in its shameless absence of restraint, too—which was a greatly appreciated break from Mutek’s regular brain-ier “digital creativity”. Funnily enough, at the exact same moment, some friends of mine were in another part of the city listening to Efdemin’s austere take on European tech-house: after The Field's orgiastic performance, I am glad I picked the Mutek event since this is where the real acid bells were ringing as far as I am concerned.
Danton Eeprom is one of Ivan Smagghe’s newest collaborators (La Horse), and it shows: the French producer’s sound is dark, ominous and heavy, as demonstrated on the creepy 'One Thing Leads to Another', a track he performed live tonight to dizzying effect. He even played some of the cuts championed by Smagghe on Cocorico 03, a move that only strengthened Eeprom’s heritage and his overall sense of musical lineage. Forget his early electro house cuts for Lektroluv or Hot Banana: the newly developed sound he showcased tonight and on recent single ‘To the Bones’ is promising indeed.
As for Radio Slave, well, rumor had it that he lost his record bag on his way to Montreal, so he actually had to beg co-performers to lend him some stuff to play. In these circumstances, Matt Edwards’ Nocturne 4 set probably wasn’t what he had in mind when he left the UK. Even so, he did open up with the Henrik Schwarz remix/Dixon edit of Ane Brun’s “Headphone Silence”, a not-so-random choice that could actually suggests deeper leanings from the Rekids boss in months to come both in terms of production and DJing. Losing your records has never sounded so sweet.
Read RA's other Mutek 2008 coverage here and here.
Photo credit: Miguel Legault