skkatter’s patchy memories of Montreak’s Mutek festival (with even more than the usual amount of namedropping)

This is a pretty long entry so I’ll put a link to the photos up here at the top.

After doing Sonar for two years (2003 and 2005) I decided I wouldn’t be heading over with half of Dublin to Barcelona for it again this year. No, instead I thought I’d be all adventurous and take a trip to Montreal, to visit the Mutek festival which is now in it’s seventh year!

Wednesday

I arrived pretty late on Tuesday evening and was too tired to do anything other than carry my bags to the airport and then collapse on my bed and go to sleep but I managed to get up bright and early on Wednesday morning to take a walk around Montreal and do some touristy stuff which mostly involved checking out Old Montreal (I guess it’s *pretty* old) and take some photos of the Notre Dame Cathedral which has a very impressive interior. I also went along to the ticket place to pick up my “Mutek Passport” which was a ticket that got you into pretty much everything except for the A\Vision 1 and 2 shows which I’ll come to later, I had to buy separate tickets for them.

So after more wandering and a bit of food I headed into the Ex-Centris venue for the first music/multimedia event of the evening which kicked off at 8pm. Oh yeah, before that I tried to order dinner in French, with hilarious results! (ie they laughed at my crap French and spoke English to me) Anyway, Ex-Centris is a theatre of sorts with three main rooms where you sit down in a seat and don’t drink alcohol! (the bar outside closed before I got to it just as the performances were starting, man that so wouldn’t work in Ireland!) The first act on were a trio of guys all dressed in black from head to toe called Cubing and they pretty much set the experimental tone that the festival would take. Each one had a Rubick’s Cube which he would hold under a camera and as they moved it closer and further away it’d produce a specific tone depending on what colour it was. So they’d change sides of the cubes (eg all red to all blue) and the tone would change. Then they’d wiggle the cube, sample the tone and have that loop while they did it again. This was all being projected onto a big screen and each movement that they sampled was also looped in video as well, cool huh? It got even weirder when they started playing with the Rubick’s cubes and the sound went weirder and more jumbled, like the sides of the cube were and they’d sample each movement over and over until near the end the projection screens had filled up with thousands of cubes all doing a different move and making a different noise. It had a lot of “wall of sound” moments but there was also a few things they did that veered towards 4/4 techno stylings. A very interesting act to watch even if half the time I didn’t like the noise they were making.

The next guy up was Pierre Bastien whose music you may have heard on Rephlex Records. He pretty much stole the show with his mechanical contraption made out of meccano and twirling metal bits. He’d have a rotating piece of metal that’d brush or hit off another one to make a springy sound, then he’d also have a rotating plastic cylinder with protruding bits that’d slowly turn around and hit the keys on a cheap looking Casio keyboard and play chords. For each track he’d change a few twirling bits and the keyboard playing cylinder and near the end he also pulled out a trumpet and laid down some really soulful (and almost sexy) notes over the whole mechanical music machine. He also played some kind of saw violin thing, had a needle bounce up and down on a broken record and used some kind of vocal sampler thing too. As well as being fascinating to watch I also thought the music was great, I heartily recommend catching his show if he ever plays near your house.

The last act in Ex-Centris were a group called Sensors Sonics Sights who were another trio, a guy that used a theremin, some weird instrument connected to an ultrasound machine where the girl would move her hands around it to create sound (in the same vein as the theremin I suppose, like a guitar and a violin both have strings, but are very different), and another guy that had these electrodes attached to his forearms that measured the muscle tension and made sounds based on that. It was pretty hardcore avant garde stuff (as the French, or in this case, French Canadians would say) and while it kept my attention for a while my mind started to wander near the end. Their sounds were all synced up to visuals and like the Cubing guys it was a lot of weird tones, bleeps, pads and oscillations.

Wednesday Night

After walking the wrong way like a fool (all I had to do was walk out and turn right, instead I turned left) I finally found my down the road to the SAT (the Society of Arts and Technology) venue just in time to see the start of Hrdvsion’s set. The SAT was a nice venue, all the artists were playing in a stage in the middle of the room that people were free to wander around behind so you could see exactly what the artist was doing. Down the other end of the room were some decks where you could listen to records of Mutek artists that were on sale and also some stalls selling other Mutek merchandise. A nice touch but I’d be a bit annoyed if I was playing a set and somebody was down the back listening to somebody else’s music. Unfortunately the sound wasn’t loud enough, I could hear people talking during most of the music unless I was right up the front and also most of the people there didn’t dance for the duration of the night! Back to the music though, Hrdvsion played a great set, all new music that I hadn’t heard before. I’ve got two of his EPs for a while now and they’re excellent too. Weird stuff tending towards IDM but still pretty danceable to.

Chris Clark was on after him, and while it seemed everybody else at Mutek were playing off laptops (more than likely running this infamous Ableton Live program that seems to be taking over nowadays) he diligently stuck to the hardware using two MPC1000s synced together to create a rather frantic set that sounded a good bit better than the one EP I have of his (must check out the other stuff so). Jackson and his Computer Band finished off the show, I’d only ever heard one of his tracks (the pretty big “Utopia” one that came out a few years ago) but I liked the rest of what I heard. I’d been veering away from most of the stuff Warp Records have released in the past while (except for Jimmy Edgar who I really like) but I feel like I’ll have to go back and check out these two guys a bit more carefully.

After the show I was (I won’t say frantically, more boisterously) trying to find a party but uber wusses Marc and Nathan were having none of it. Fortunately Chris Clark said that somebody had invited him back to a party in some hotel which he had written down on a piece of paper: “719 Quality”. Holy crap I thought, that could be anywhere, but we got into a taxi and asked the driver to take us to Hotel Quality, which might be number 719 on some street. The taxi driver said he knew of two Quality Hotels but neither of them were number 719 but he’d bring us to the nearest one. All the way there I kept thinking “Quality…….quality………why does that sound familiar?” Of course once we pulled up I realised it was *my* hotel, and the number was obviously the room number. Boy am I an idiot. Anyway we went in and hung out with a mixture of Canadians randomers and the two Americans that were staying in that room (Leigh and Jon, they proceeded to adopted me as their Irish lucky charm and we hung out all weekend) and stayed up drinking until a ridiculously liver destroying time.

Thursday Night

Notice how I completely omitted the day section of Thursday? That’s because I woke up at 9pm still in my jacket with drool coming out the side of my mouth. One quick de-drooling later (or a shower as they call them in Canada) I was on my way to the SAT venue again for the second night event. Unfortunately my debauchery meant that I’d missed Akufen’s “5mm” project with Gabriel Coutu-Dumont and also Skam Record’s act Freeform who I’d seen in The Funnel years ago (1998?) and was pretty weird and good back then. (I’d also missed a load of other stuff, Mutek isn’t really an alcoholics friendly music festival, if I had it my way everything would start at 11pm somehow) The music on Thursday night didn’t start off as well as Wednesday. Eliot Lipp was the first act on, he was using iTunes to play some tracks and was playing keyboards and triggering some samples over it (well that’s what it looked like), it didn’t seem like he was putting too much into it and the music was a bit flat (your think a tamer version of Four Tet maybe). 1-Speed Bike was up next, he’s the drummer from God Speed You Black Emperor and he was using two CDJs to mix tracks together and also had a mic that he used to swear at the crowd with (”What the hell are you guys doing behind me!? You can see I’m only pressing play!”) He played a mix of decent drill n’bass and bad gabba with folk samples over it. It was a V/VM type “so bad it’s good” show for the first half, but then I got bored with it.

My boredom quickly left once Modeselektor came on, these guys totally rocked the place with their dsp cut up reggaeton madness. I liked the album but their live show blew me up and away. The Canadians even started dancing, it was like a proper club night at last! Modeselektor were full of beans, it was the most energetic performance I saw at Mutek and they finished off with one half of them spraying champagne over the crowd while the other shouted “You party harder maybe!?” into a mic. Classic stuff, somebody needs to bring these guys over to Dublin post haste! Once again it was back to the unofficial Mutek party venue (Jon and Leigh’s room at the hotel) where we argued about whose laptop played music the loudest (my IBM Thinkpad’s speakers are a lot louder than all their wimpy Powerbooks), oh yeah we had free broadband in the hotel rooms so I made them download all my mixes and forced them to listen to each one and explained how each mix was clever and how that Autechre remix of Phoenecia wasn’t ever going to be repressed on Schematic. Oh yes, I’m a fun person to party with.

Friday Night

Fr-fr-fr-Friday! The freshest day of the week, before skkatterday that is. Anyway do I need to explain why I missed all the daytime stuff again? No? Good, so it’s off to a new venue this time called “Fonderie Darling” (which is French for the Darling Foundry, so I was expecting lots of waxed pumped up big-muscled guys dancing on podiums in a haze of poppers) Founderie Darling was a big kind of expo hall (?) thing, like the Digital Arts Centre in Dublin, the ceiling was pretty high so the sound was rather echoy, somebody told me the sound was usually even worse but they brought in lots more speakers to sort it out. Well it still wasn’t 100% but if I stayed up near the front it was alright. Tonights acts were Pheek (who replaced Lawrence who missed his flight), Stephen Beaupre, Alex Under, Guido Schneider and Perlon Records owner Zip aka Dimbiman so as you can probably guess it was pretty much 100% minimal techno from the word go. Alex Under was pretty decent and Dimbiman tore the place up but personally I thought Guido Schneider was the best act of the night by far. I’ve only got one or two of his remixes but I’ll definitely be hunting down his album (it’s on Poker Flat, uh oh!). Every act was playing off an iBook or Powerbook, I swear, Apple should put some kind of minimal techno tax on their products, they’d make a mint! The crowd were sitting down on the floor when I got there, which almost made my cry, but they quickly got up and danced and the place was sold out so it was nicely packed with a great rave atmosphere up the front. Definitely a skkatter approved night, the only problem was the slightly weak sound system.

Saturday Night

[insert token excuse for missing all the day stuff here, with references to celebrity techno producers and formaldehyde] Before we headed off to the next gig me and Jon went across the road to buy some beer for the inevitable hotel room after party that we’d have, on the way out I bumped into Ricardo Villalobos getting out of a taxi as he happened to be staying in our hotel. He told us he’d been held by airport security in Montreal for four hours for questioning due to the large amount of cash he was carrying (he’d been on tour and had gotten paid in cash by a few places) as well as some other dodgy questions such as why had he left Chile when he did, what had he been doing in Cuba when he was there etc. Holy fascist state, and we thought it was only the USA on a crazy power trip! So we said our goodbyes (he was going for a nap) and headed off.

Saturday night’s event was on in a club Downtown (right beside SAT actually) called Metropolis and this club was a really classy place. Check the photos section to see what I’m talking about. Plush carpets on the way in, great sound system (at last!), interesting visuals projected around the place and lots of beautiful Canadians, beautiful Americans, a sprinkling of beautiful Europeans all sipping their drinks along with one pasty white Irish guy gulping his. So with such quality surroundings I looked forward to a great night only to be hugely disappointed by the music. First of all, Los Hermanos had originally been on the Mutek lineup to play this night, but this was then changed to Interstellar Fugitives. Either one will do me, I thought, some proper Detroit techno would really hit the spot right now. But disaster struck, Interstellar Fugitives had cancelled (I’d read a cryptic message posted by Mad Mike on the UR page earlier on in the day alluding to disagreements within the band), they were replaced by Lawrence (who was supposed to be playing yesterday, hmmmmm). Anyway, Lawrence was probably the best act of the night but he was on first, he played some really atmospheric spooky but not too hard techno that I’d have loved to hear later on in the night. Chris Clark eloquently described the next act Mossa as “ball achingly dull” and I have to agree with him. Funky house by [funky] numbers, the best thing about his act was his loud shirt.

Finally an act I was looking forward too, The Detroit Grand Pubahs hit the stage with their tree man live act. Front man Paris The Black Fu strutted on stage wearing a fake beard, some kind of sarong around his waist carrying a mic and a bottle of whiskey, liberally pouring it out for whatever audience member held up his cup (which turned out to be quite a few!). I think it was Andy Toth on guitar and a masked man (The Mysterious Mr. O?) on sampling/misc equipment duties. The show kicked off with some 140+ bpm electro with wah-wah pedal guitar licks and Paris telling us all how much he wanted to grab girls asses. Straight away I was bouncing around like a mad eejit up the front but unfortunately the show lost a bit of its energy after 20 minutes or so because it was pretty much variants of the same theme, a fast unchanging electro beat with rock guitar and Paris singing over it. There were a few costume changes and solos to try to keep us interested but I ended up wandering down the back and taking a few photos instead.

French duo Noze were up next, you may remember them from playing Sonar in 2005. Well I didn’t, if I had I would have left because I hated pretty much every second of their set, bad French house, two guys screaming at the crowd and taking their tops off. “Please God” I thought, “make Thomas Brinkmann come on quickly”. Eventually he did but imagine my disappointment when he played out a dull as dishwater minimal by numbers techno set. I was really surprised because I’ve got a few of his records and they’re a lot better. I was talking to a guy called Andy from Glasgow later on who said he brought over Brinkmann to play at his night (I can’t for the night of me remember the night’s name though, it’s over now) and he was a lot better so we agreed that maybe Thomas was just having an off day. I left the Metropolis more than slightly disappointed that they hadn’t put some of the better acts of the festival in there.

Sunday

On Saturday night I warned my newly acquired American co-revellers Jon and Leigh that I did not want to miss the Minus showcase (which started at the ridiculously early time of 1pm on Sunday afternoon) so we were all in bed by 5am and up in time to grab some delicious waffles from the breakfast place across the road. One quick taxi drive (and a couple of stopping to ask directions later) and we were at the Place De L’Homme sculpture in the Parc Jean-Drapeau which is a huge park of many areas. This one area had Magda, Troy Pierce, Marc Houle, Ricardo Villalobos and Richie Hawtin playing in it. This was a family day out type of affair, with added booze! Yes, they let us bring booze in there, much to my surprise. And even more to my surprise, they were selling booze, in the park! Bonus! People had brought picnics, dogs, cats, their kids and lots of those funny smelling cigarettes that they kept trying to share with me for some reason. Troy Pierce and Magda kicked things off in their usual slow building style. I don’t really think I need to describe the Minus set, practically everybody in the world has seen these lot by now. They were great, they do a similar thing each time but it’s good and I like it. The setting helped a lot, outdoors on a sunny (but a tad cloudy) afternoon, the river just over there where you could sit on the rocks, Montreal’s famous biosphere behind us (check my photos, it’s mental looking) and an ever increasing crowd that I’d say almost got to 2000 by the time we were finished (oh yeah, if you didn’t have the weekend Mutek pass it was only 7 dollars in, that’s about 5 euro!). It was one of the best outdoor clubbing experiences I’ve had, surpassing Sonar’s beach parties due to the smaller numbers, better music, nicer people and smaller queues (and I hate sand). When I saw the lineup a few weeks before I questioned putting the Minus showcase on so early in the day but after being at it I can say it did make sense and I’m glad they programmed it that way.

Sunday night

The finale event was back in the Fonderie Darling venue but we got there a bit late due to wanting to get some food. We met some other Mutek goers at our hotel who recommended we check out a bar/restaurant called Cobalt which was small and fancy. The staff there (a girl at the bar and a guy in the kitchen) hadn’t banked on a big group of Mutekkies arriving and were a bit run off their feet so the girl asked us if we minded “DJing with the iPod while I serve people”, so I flicked through the Prince, M.I.A, Miles Davis and other such hits until it was time to go down to the venue. We missed Mike Shannon and Jan Jelinek but I caught almost all of Pole and his band’s set. I saw Pole years ago in Dublin in the TBMC (with Patrick Pulsinger, it was a UMack gig) but he was a lot less clickly and fuzzy this time, a lot more upbeat but still retaining his signature Pole sound. The drummer and bass player worked really well with his kind of music. Deadbeat was the final act, and his stuff fitted in well to Pole’s, that ~Scape dubby sound was definitely in evidence. I was pretty destroyed from five days constant partying at this stage and had to head home like a big girls blouse at 2:40am, Jon and Leigh went off to an after party and were bumping asses with the Minus boys well into the early hours though. Those lucky kids!

Overall I loved Mutek. I really did. Like any other festival of this kind the music was patchy in places, but there was plenty of great music to keep me happy. Also, the people were incredibly friendly, I got great service at every bar, restaurant and shop I went to. For example, when I first got my Mutek “all events pass” thing, I was given a ticket, you were supposed to go upstairs and swap this ticket for an accreditation pass (they’d take your photo etc), but I thought the ticket was the pass. At the first event I went to they ripped the stub of the ticket off, then at the second event they looked at my stub less ticket and said “Dude, where’s your accreditation?” Once I explained my stupid mistake they let me in, and the next day I easily got my accreditation sorted out with zero fuss. Try doing that in Ireland. Also all the security were easy going, there were minimal (haha, geddit?) queues at everything and the locals seemed to love the festival, unlike Sonar where the locals gave me the look of death whenever I went into a shop. Mutek is still a lot smaller than Sonar but I keep making comparisons because it kind of reminds me of Sonar a bit (the music, the laid back culture, the sun). Another great point is that all the venues are pretty close together and getting taxis in Montreal is really easy (although I could walk to almost all the venues from my hotel). I will definitely be checking out the line up next year and I’d recommend you do to before it gets to big for itself like Sonar has.