- The last time I went clubbing with a bad cold seems like half a lifetime ago when I crawled out of bed to catch Eddie "Flashin" Fowlkes deliver a set in Australia. The gig ended up being more famous for Fowlkes' onstage vomiting before the show than the music. I am not sure Eddie was really sick, yet for me the club wasn't the worst place to be. Back then, ravers were still using Vicks VapoRub, which meant there was at least some remote and legal medical excuse for being there. Regardless, I returned home disappointed, leaden-headed and worse than I started.
Vicks is thankfully no longer de rigueur, leaving me with little medical pretence to get out of bed and go clubbing on a Friday night. Worse, perhaps, was the exceptionally nasty weather, flooding the south with rain and blanketing the north of Spain in snow. Barcelona was somewhere in between, filled with thunder and lightning storms and messy squalls that I thought might keep all the good folk away from the last show of Mutek's three night mini-festival.
How wrong I was. The weather certainly delayed their arrival, but the exceptionally diverse and up-for-it crowd made their mark on the evening. The mixture of club, suburban, gay and glamour fashions probably owed as much to the varied use of the long-serving La Discotheque venue as to the draw card of the music itself. But to risk stating the obvious, it was the unified intention to party that helped make this an exceptional show. The genius of the crowd, as it were.
The delays meant that Raum club regular and opener C-More struggled to get a critical mass together on the dance floor until later than expected. A few stragglers and the early excess of a few meant clusters of dancers formed and separated, but there was still plenty of floor visible for a long time. It was a shame, as his hook-laden tech house set was persistent, functional and reassuringly unpretentious. Full credit to him for going long while the rain abated, without ever growing disinterested or boring.
Back in business after an extended sabbatical, Marc Leclair, AKA Akufen, was waving the Canadian flag for the festival, yet his long-awaited arrival didn't quite go to plan. On plugging in, he couldn't get enough power from his equipment and with the hour already late, the rain-soaked crowd began to whistle and heckle impatiently. Once resolved, however, the jeers turned to cheers as Akufen delighted with a master class of set design.
Rather than ramp up the pitch shifter or mindlessly throw on big room tracks to iron over the creases, Akufen kept the volume low and gradually eased it up, building the music into the room. Cleverly alternating between more driving techno and the more soulful swing of house, he managed to trap the crowd in a blurred channel of heavy momentum and lighter feeling. Classic-sounding Chicago house and even sneaky runs of piano tech predominated, a lifetime away from the more cerebral microhouse he is often associated with. It is rarely that you arrive at the end of a two hour set without even the slightest notion that it wasn't just one piece of music.
If Akufen had been brilliant, then French techno mavericks dOP were an epiphany. Coming on last was no accident, the trio's physical presence and physical excess was always intended to elevate the night up another notch. Watching them down vodka from the bottle, chant, roll eyes and punch the air could have been nothing more than a gimmick if it wasn't for the pure determination of the music. Deep bass—more like a wash than a pulse—chiselled beats and slowly wound hi-hats dug deep trenches for fractured vocals and messy samples to fight over. Again, like Akufen, the set felt like a whole despite the breaks and breakdowns and the ridiculous stage antics. The crowd loved it too, even upping their umbrellas towards the end.
I arrived home later than I imagined, but my cold was nowhere to be seen. Whereas Fowlkes' lacklustre show hadn't been the cure, Micro Mutek's spectacle brimming with genuine rock & roll sentiment had been just what the doctor ordered. De puta madre as they say in Spanish, though next time Massive Mutek might be a better name.