- MUTEK's flagship festival in Montreal is truly unique on the circuit. The music across its five-day run is loud, and you're likely to spend a lot of time basking in flashing lights and trippy visuals, but it's distinctly not a rave. The vast majority of the bookings are live acts, and though you can dance through much of the program, the performers treat the 4/4 kick as an optional compositional conceit. Much of it is presented at the clean, modern and very un-clubby Musée d'art contemporain, which feels about right—MUTEK is less a standard electronic music festival than an exhibition where prime gallery space goes to producers, electroacoustic musicians and video artists working at the furthest reaches of their field.
Like plenty of contemporary art shows, MUTEK was a bit of a mixed bag this year. But even if not every set was a home run, I loved the constant thrill of the new. My favorite performance, Atom™ & Robin Fox's Double Vision set, which made its North American debut on the Thursday night in the big room at MAC, was tangentially related to what you'd see in a nightclub, but it felt like its own thing entirely. The pair performed from the back of the room, giving the front of the house over to Uwe Schmidt's appealingly synthetic visuals and Fox's high-powered lasers, both of which did more to emphasize the music than their knob-twiddling could have. The music—punchy, pop-tinged techno à la Atom™'s 2013 album HD that would swerve into more intense and abstract passages—was excellent on its own, but the video and light show, calibrated to visually enhance every beat and synth zap, made it all the better.
The best visuals at MUTEK worked like Double Vision: they were inextricable from the music they were paired with. Local A/V duo Trojan Horse Of Meaning, who played on Saturday in the smaller, downstairs MAC space, made smeared, noisy ambient music while VHS scuzz flickered on a giant square screen. Both might have been boring on their own, but taken together, they had a meditative, alluring effect. Ditto Dasha Rush's Antarctic Takt show upstairs at MAC on Thursday, which featured visuals by the Russian artist Stanislav Glazov—the highly abstract ambient techno was as icy as the polar landscape represented on screen.
Music For Lamps, which was exactly what the name implies, may have made the connection a bit too tight. As IDM-ish electronic music buzzed around the downstairs space at MAC, a handful of lamps flickered on and off. The performance notes explained that the lamps themselves, outfitted with surface transducer speakers (devices that can turn anything solid into a sound emitter), were responsible for the sounds. It's a technical feat and a novel idea, but the presentation didn't quite work—the lamps, all clustered in one corner of the room, weren't easy to see unless you were at the front, and the music couldn't carry the whole performance on its own. I also couldn't quite see the connection between the intensely percussive music in Tyondai Braxton's Hive, performed on Saturday in the Théâtre Maisonneuve concert hall (which typically presents classical music and dance), and the light-up oval pods on which the instrumentalists were sitting cross-legged. Both felt a little gimmicky as a result.
Not every live set had a specific visual pairing, though, and that suited much of the music just fine. In two instances downstairs at MAC, I watched the crowd instantaneously rise from their seats on the floor and start vigorously dancing: once for Basic House's powerful techno on Thursday, and again for Perfume Advert's expansive dub techno on Sunday. Gunnar Haslam, who played Saturday at MAC upstairs, was premiering a live set that already sounded lived-in and expansive. Winding through brutal techno, mind-scrambling acid and uneasy atmospherics, it drew the strongest gestures from his albums and EPs and made them stronger. Steffi's live set could have had more variety—it was front-to-back slamming club music—but she undeniably brought the house down on Friday at Métropolis, the cavernous concert venue that hosts many of MUTEK's highest-profile bookings. Rrose, who came on immediately after her, scooped up the danced-out crowd and thrust them further out with pitch-black, perfectly immersive techno.
The afternoon outdoor party on Friday served as a showcase for Canada's bumper-crop of young, smoked-out house producers, and the trio of 1080p alums who played were among the most charming bookings at the festival: Project Pablo sat perpendicular to the crowd and played a MIDI controller piano-recital-style; Khotin went proportionately hard, playing up the danciest elements of his chilled house sound; and the duo Neu Balance put on an endearingly scruffy, tempo-diverse jam that at one point found member Seam Beatch taking off one of his shoes—New Balances, of course—and placing it in front of their gear, with the big N facing out for emphasis.
MUTEK this year could have benefitted from a bit more sanctioned fun. In years past, the Sunday program was co-produced with Piknic Électronik, the big Montreal open-air just outside the city, where guests like Donato Dozzy and Ricardo Villalobos (two heavies from last year) would stick a big exclamation mark on the end of the weekend. MUTEK held their own event on Sunday afternoon, with Adrian Sherwood, Daniel Bell and Kode9, but it didn't give the nudge that the festival could have used in its final stretch—it was just a slightly louder iteration of the laid-back shows MUTEK had been staging at the same spot each afternoon. And the big Friday and Saturday night showcases at Métropolis never quite became the raucous club nights they could have been. But to paraphrase what a more experienced MUTEK-er told me early in the festival, if serious electronic live sets aren't your thing, then don't come to MUTEK and act disappointed. MUTEK in 2015 was indeed a wonderful anomaly—a festival designed not only to poke at your pleasure centers, but to challenge your tastes, raise your expectations and get you thinking.
Photo credits: Trung Dung Nguyen (Dasha Rush, Atom™ & Robin Fox, Rrose, crowd), Kamielle Dalati-Vachon (Khotin),