Monitor: Listen
The Sound of Mutek
Words: Philip Sherburne
If you had made it to the very end of Mutek -- and by the very end, I mean 5 a.m. Sunday, June 2, as the sun needled in through the club's velvet curtains, when Ric y Martin's beats finally evaporated in a puff of pixel-sound and worn dancers emerged rubber-limbed and bleary-eyed from their private trances -- you would have understood that the event was a full-body experience. But not physical in the dully visceral manner of raves or rock shows: Mutek, Montreal's annual electronic music festival that began May 29, incorporated dance music, experimental sound, digital video and genre-bending graphic design in such a way that thrilled the eye and the organs as much as the ear.
Now in its third year, Mutek -- an independent festival spun off from the notorious Media Lounge events at the new media festival FCMM -- ranks as one of North America's most advanced electronic music showcases. Unlike Miami's Winter Music Conference, devoted to the business of dance music, or Detroit Electronic Music Festival, dedicated to the Motor City techno Diaspora, or Chicago's excellent but rigorously experimental Transmissions festival, Mutek's range incorporated digital pointillists SND, Cagean turntablist Janek Schaefer, East German electro prankster Felix Kubin, and techno heartthrob Ricardo Villalobos alike. While Mutek's 2000 and 2001 programs favored austere minimalism and microsound, curators Alain Mongeau, Eric Mattson and Vincent Lemieux seemed to find their comfort zone this year, resisting the pull of a "Mutek sound" and reaching out in wildly disparate directions. While Ghislain Poirier, Ben Nevile and Pan/Tone cleaved to the generally understated dialect of minimal techno, other performers spoke more unusual tongues. Paris' Copacabanark revived the heady days of acid with an overdriven set full of squelching feedback and beats on the fly. Kubin and his comrade Nova Huta evinced ebullient circus camp as they pounded on vintage keyboards, performed East German marching songs and sparkled in their silver spandex.
In fact, the move away from static, laptop performance toward a more dynamic stage show was a theme running through the festival's five days. Matthew Herbert's appearance as Radio Boy was the week's most bombastic, as he shredded Gap boxer shorts, Disney DVDs and similar by-products of globalism into his sampler, crafting beats in real time and churning out a densely funky paean to the politics of refusal. But even Luomo -- Finland's Vladislav Delay in his house guise -- proved that PowerBook performances need not be dull, as he flipped his Prince Valiant mane from behind a spotlit notebook computer, pushing out overdriven disco-pop to coax the audience toward an ecstatic climax.
Even as Luomo worked the crowd toward orgiastic frenzy, at the back of the cavernous Métropolis club there was a very different side of electronic music culture on display, in the form of the exhibit 35mm | Design in Miniature (www.fallt.com/ 35mm/), a set of 48 35mm slides displayed inside handheld viewers and miniature light boxes. The mini-show, curated by Fällt designers Fehler, commented slyly on the micro-economy of underground digital culture even as it lovingly fetishized the pleasures of pixel-sized aesthetics. On flat-panel monitors nearby, Vs. (www.fallt.com/vs), meanwhile, pitted Fehler against Taylor Deupree and Richard Chartier of microsound labels 12k and LINE, as the design collectives reworked each other's distinctive album art in a visual approximation of the soundclash. Elsewhere throughout the festival, the visual proved itself of utmost importance to a generation of artists raised in front of computer screens: Montreal duo Dioxyde programmed generative constellations of dots and lines to complement their low drones, while Sue Costabile, of San Francisco's Orthlorng Musork, accompanied the label's artists Stephan Mathieu and Timeblind with real-time animations made of unspooling film and objects scattered across an overhead projector. At one point, when Timeblind's laptop crashed for the umpteenth time, she even incorporated a handwritten note proclaiming "Stupid computer" into her shifting visuals--an ironic gesture that fit perfectly with Mutek's constantly rotating dialectic between technology and imagination.
