mutek just as you're missing it, part 1/4

[david turgeon <david.t@xxxxxxxx>]

out of sheer desire for public involvement, i have decided to grant all the 
non-montrealers with the real deal as to what is going on in the worldwide 
capital of sin(e waves), glitch & cute girls.  for 5 days the city is going 
to groove to forbidding tones & shudder in complex intellectual poses.  my 
own self-assessed goal thus is to report directly, on a daily basis, in 
order to keep is as real as real is, & such forth.  so i'll (also) keep it 
short or everybody's going to get bored quickly.  now, if the festival 
lasts 5 days, why make it a 4-part thing?  well, the reason is that i will 
be in québec on the last day.  which is the techno night if i understand 
well, & isn't that convenient.

i arrived late at the *personal & non-transferable* mutek cocktail, for 
important people only.  i used this time to practice my social skills & 
"talk business" like the real boys.  you know you've got a lot to emulate, 
kid, if you wanna go somewhere.  okay, what i really gathered from this 
cocktail were 2 free beers (despite what they say about free beer!) & my 
passport for the rest of the event, so there.  akufen's set was 
ridiculously groovy & not very serious.  which was quite appropriate given 
the casual atmosphere.

but who am i, teasing the friendly crowd of the insiders, you know that the 
real deal is the music & mutek has some little jewels to offer on this 
edition.  we've got some visit from "the rest of canada" this year.  one of 
these is vitaminsforyou, which is one guy, his laptop & his mixer.  he 
opened the festival with a honest set.  he had a good thing going with his 
mixture of IDM & microsound, & i might have not been the best public for 
it.  i thought there could have been something more, but what?  the sound 
itself however is quite intense, some bass pulses really got inside 
me.  amazing wooden floor, i must say.

i really much preffered snd, & anyway i was looking forward to hear 
them.  i don't like every single piece that they did but i like their 
methods.  tonight they were doing it real-time, creating the song as it 
went, & the results were ambivalent: either it was stellar, or it was 
nice-sounding dross.  they did things they don't do on CD (that i heard), 
like incorporating long backgrounds of sounds, or building songs mostly out 
of loud bass drums (to an amazing result, i must say.)  at first it didn't 
seem to be going anywhere but as soon as it picked up i really enjoyed it & 
it was quite the caliber i was expecting from snd.

the next 2 installments had video in them.  the first, by a montréal duo 
named dioxyde, was by far the highlight.  i never heard about these people, 
but their video was so good i barely paid any attention to the music; it 
seemed more as though the image was controlling the sound than the other 
way around (which is what was actually happening.)  put simply, it was 
improvisation & it gave me the same sort of intense sensorial pleasure as 
watching a good norman mclaren film does.  the sounds would have been 
ordinary out of this context; here, they complement the images very 
nicely.  it only started getting less interesting when the same shapes & 
effects begun to reappear in the last piece/movie, but that piece 
incidentally was more interesting on the sonic side, so it wasn't 
completely wasted.

lastly, after some technical problems, the mens/koolwyk duo started.  here 
the video was decidedly more simple & oldschool, looking more like ascii 
effects (think jodi.org with a 1000% zoom...)  i must say it was actually 
quite cool, but overall it was much more repetitive & accessory than 
dioxyde's, so one had to rely on the music...  & the music was this sort of 
murky 4/4 thing which i didn't really get into.  anyway, my last beer was 
finished, so i decided it was time to go check what the next show at the 
SAT was like.  upon leaving the ex-centris complex i found that it was 
raining like crazy so i decided it was really time to go to the comfort of 
my flat.  because of the unfortunate delays at ex-centris it was already 
too late for hellothisisalex anyway.

tomorrow: i'll be missing the free 5 PM show.  please don't take it 
personally, i have a vernissage to attend.  i'll try to make it in time for 
duul_drv, who plays last, & who doesn't come to montréal too often.  the 
8:30 PM show (helen of troy, ghislain poirier, stephan mathieu, janek 
schaefer) is the highlight for me, though i suspect it will be 
"atmospheric" it should not be "soporific".  this is followed by a 11 PM 
show with solvent vs lowfish, bola & ensemble (in lieu of "gescom 
djs").  bring your berlitz autechre pronunciation guides!!@#

have a nice day
~ david