Mutek.[5] -- Resolution, Resonance & Caveat Emptor: MINDFUCKING

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

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[multimedia content -- videos! -- will be at http://www.dustedmagazine.com
on Friday .. tV]
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Mutek.[5] -- Resolution, Resonance & Caveat Emptor: MINDFUCKING

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"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial
means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger look=
s
at it, it moves again since it is life.... This is the artist's way of
scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable
oblivion through which he must someday pass."

--William Faulkner, Interview with Paris Review, 1956.

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 The final report, cobbled together from everything scratched on paper,
backs of business cards, a still-damp notepad ... and it seems, through two
different general wills: those who dig into the significance, beyond
journalism, of considering the cultural exchange of Mutek, and those who
wished they lived in a vacuum, their actions invisible to history.

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Being a writer--not a journalist, or perhaps I should say, a journalist in
the way they meant journalism in the '50s, "New Journalism," perhaps, and
not today--is a risky proposition: for often it means writing one's friends=
,
acquaintances, enemies, hell, the human flesh and all its vicissitudes into
the narrative. And some of us don't like it: to the point where even an
attempt at a joking apology for doing so is taken as a further threat. Now =
I
cannot even, at this point, outline what the hell I am talking about. But i=
t
makes me realise a few things, namely as to how a writer must simply plow
on, despite the various pressures applied by external forces to write
this-or-that, to avoid saying certain things, to basically maintain a
public/private distinction that never existed in the first place. I could
restate what I am saying like this: I fucking hated the bullshit,
behind-the-back shit which took place in highschool... You know, where you
said you liked someone then told your friends what a shitty moron they were=
..
It populates the over-the-drinks conversations at Mutek... I just won't do
that-- which makes the honest writer, even the gonzo writer, somewhat of a
risky position, even an untenable one.

Writing a no-holds-barred diary-critique has some history. Perhaps one of
the most famous would be the chronicles of Samuel Johnson, the British
writer and dictionary compiler, written by the infamous Boswell [see
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/ ]. Today, I guess, we have the
population of mindnumbing Bloggers. But even now writing about the Real
poses some danger-- it is only today, some 80 years later, that we are
finally getting the real story between Ana=EFs Nin and Henry Miller, for
example. Of course everyone knew they were lovers, but the Estate of the tw=
o
wouldn't release their letters until all remaining parties had passed on.
True, this all changed somewhat with the Beats. Actually, it could be noted
that it has always been a thread in poetic discourse--note the secret gems
hidden in most Romantic poetry, hinting at the threesomes between Shelley,
Mary Shelley and Byron at their cottage in Switzerland... and of course the=
y
wrote of their experiences, long swims out to the sea, delving into opium;
but with the Beats, it was rough and dirty, and perhaps it was the
journalists who came out of that era, took the Beats one step farther, or
even preceeded it-- notably Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, H.L Mencken and
Norman Mailer; I might also mention Lenny Bruce and Allen Ginsberg, hell,
Carl Berstein & Bob Woodward.

But hold on--you say, hold on: this is Mutek, not worldwide politics. Indee=
d
it is. But today politics is a fa=E7ade, and the real moments exist in those
cracks where we all attempt to ill-define and carve out some sense of
freedom through the splinter organisation of our desires, desires that are
perhaps more serious in their energy than we often realise. Late on Monday
morning, as Richie and Ricardo traded wax at the afterparty, I explained th=
e
concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone to [name removed by legal counsel]
who had never heard of it before.. "This IS one," I said; "It's free, it ha=
s
its own economy, it operates at a level perpendicular to the law--illegal i=
n
all respects, geared toward nothing but pleasure, a focal point of desire,
with its own codas that are, nonetheless, always changing .. it's temporary
.. and it's us." Well, maybe not quite so eloquently--later he patted me on
the back and said "Goodbye, tobias," as I think he thought I was a little
too rambled... perhaps I am, perhaps not; regardless, what it comes down
to--when the interdictions drop on speaking on, about and of others--is
losing the ability to speak of oneself. And this is in fact what current la=
w
seems to uphold. A recent US court case barred Tucker Max from speaking of
his former girlfriend, Katy Johnson.. both have websites; the irony is that
Ms. Johnson is former Miss Vermont 1999, and founder of wonderfully puritan
organisations such as the Sobriety Society.. Max Taylor's diary of their
relationship "put to question" the sobriety claims of the ex-beauty queen
[to say the least: think sex & drinking..]; but now he's not even allowed t=
o
talk about it. In other words, he can't even talk about a part of his own
life. Check it in the NYT:

[ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/national/02INTE.html?th ].

Meaning that.. yeah, here we are: writing not for the now, but for the sake
of what we can only see as a future--for the future itself. Back to Mutek.

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SUNDAY AFTERNOON MINDFUCK
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The simplest way to begin understanding the two-days that began on Sunday i=
s
simply by saying: MINDFUCK. "Back in the mid-'90s," a cabal of us almost
threw a party with this title; we thought it a little too obvious. But ther=
e
is nothing subtle about Mego...

The afternoon began, first of all, with an exhausted audience, wandering in
from the street, many already stoned or still drunk, meandering about
ashen-faced; the Mutek volunteers looked like they hadn't slept in days...
immediately half of us took to the cement floor, laying down in the muck to
absorb the coming sounds.. and seep forth they did, at first in waves and
drones and eventually with jagged knives: first with Cal Crawford, who
transmitted the point across as to what we should be doing--listening--with
a blast of an airhorn that signalled the start of his fascinating collectio=
n
of vertical soundscapes... A weird thing happened, in fact, that I could no=
t
tell if it was planned or not; after his blast, someone slowly whistled fro=
m
the balcony ... Crawford, stone-faced, responded with another airhorn
blast.. someone on the floor yelled "a duo!"... Yes, things were getting to
some level indeed ... Crawford--from Montr=E9al--did some mean things in his
set, engaging in exposed soundscapes that sucked us deep, deep into his
mind, only to raise the volume and the intensity, in a manner not unlike
Francisco Lopez, only to cut it right at the moment of release-- [silence]
-- & ending his set with another somewhat unexpected airhorn blast.
Truthfully, it was a well-suited contextual introduction to what was to
follow, which was, in fact, Pita from Mego. Pita lulled us; into drones,
deep, effervescent walls-of-noise, not so loud as to destroy us, always on
the verge, but receding before the points of pain... then, not Hecker as th=
e
program stated, but Kevin Drumm: enter the dragon, so to speak, with both
his trademark strobe slowly illuminating the brain patterns, subjecting us
all to hallucinogenic light networks behind closed eyelids and a stuttered,
stop-motion reality with our beacons open... faster and faster went the
strobe, and Drumm's soaring, delicate, and beautiful noisefuck destroyed us=
,
on the floor, humming, humming along our spines-- hands down an incredible
set, the step onwards and out from Pita.. and into: surrealist, cut-up
Japanese pop; something few of us, without spoilers, could have guessed. Fo=
r
next was Tujiko Noriko, also on Mego, but nothing like her cohorts. While
the same dissonance could be heard in her cut-and-paste beatscapes,
reminiscent of AGF, Noriko crossed herself somewhere between Bj=F6rk's weirde=
r
moments and a resurrected, Hentai version of Andr=E9 Breton... Let me tell yo=
u
what she looks like: white and black striped dress, cute Japanese girl,
make-up, all done up, very gentle, small, slight, "petite;" again .. Hentai
fantasy-material ... she came up and said hello in Japanese, a bit of
English and French; and began to work with childlike soundscapes, field
recordings, and then, her own live vocals, sung over herself, sampling
herself, singing to others absent from the stage, about love, about life,
and, in what resonated with me for the rest of the festival, if not still
echoing-- "I cannot make music," sweetly sung, innocently, but with eyes
that betrayed her fuck-over of all pop's ignorant facades; "We cannot make
music...", she concluded with, less an admission of failure than a plea to
understand that we no longer know what music is, where it was, what it ever
has been ;

Brilliant.

If there's anyone to take Bj=F6rk's shoes--develop her one step further, remi=
x
in the best of AGF-- it's Tujiko Noriko. And were we not all passed out on
the floor, she would have received a standing ovation... in lieu, she
received a barrage of cheering that eclipsed all the shows at Studio up to
that point, and only surpassed by the response to Narod Niki; we were all,
it seemed, in love with what cannot be touched and yet touched us deeply. A
couple front centre stage-right started making out... & in between her
songs, she spoke to us in Japanese -- it didn't matter that we didn't
understand; for the language was almost, somehow, speaking of her touch and
not of subjects, objects, and things.

Like in any good Japanese porn imbued with a perverse violence that is quit=
e
possibly second-to-none on this planet, next came the hentai monster--
Florian Hecker.

As David Turgeon noted--and I guess I can quote him, as he wrote this to
microsound.org--his performance was largely "inexplicable."

Violent? Aggressive? A laboratory of spiked sounds that scythed at volumes
so precisely deafening that, at points, he looked a little, and suddenly,
worried?

Sickening .. ? Many of us couldn't take it; I felt physically ill. It wasn'=
t
the volume, or the noise--this was something other than noise. This was
fuckery with frequencies that were *destroying* any sense of what or who I
was, sitting here in the afternoon in a darkened comedy club that had been
turned into a chamber of aural horrors... All orifices opened by surgical
incisions of spiked soundwaves. What can I say:

Not much, it seems. If he plays near you, go ..well, "experience"
him/it/them, all the schizo things in there that I will only gesture at..
what it made me think and how it made me feel .. bad flashbacks that felt
oh, so, so good. Like watching Bob Flanagan. Yes, Trace Reddell--and I gues=
s
I can say this to as he posted it to microsound.org--this time the mirror
was *not* all reassembled, it was destroyed, smashed, and infinitely splaye=
d
into so many fragments that following the progression of this sonic
dispersion, at its limit, would result in the most dangerous and obsessive
madnesses.=20

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I think Florian Hecker might actually be mad.

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Well, after Hecker, we were all a little dazed, tongues lolling in mouths,
ears, brains dripping out onto shoulders, floors, hips.. whatever. And from
this muck, Gentle Bakemono--yes, another moniker for the neverending
Montr=E9aler known as David Kristian--had the task of reassembling sanity, at
least into enough of a whole to undergo the basic processes of eating,
shitting, and fucking.

It was good. Kristian is all about the analogue, and all about producing an=
d
travelling through every single genre of electronic music; his latest works
have been for the Wikkid drum 'n' bass label. Guiding us through downtempo
ambient was thus an easy task... while the analogue grounded the unwinding
journey, digital detritus splayed its particles across the tar... I feel
like just repeating--"good," but not mindblowing; Kristian risks, somewhat,
being left behind in the wake of the computer revolution--he's taking steps
to acquaint himself, but I think he has a bit more to go in this respect. I=
n
the meantime, we were all party to a gentle bakemono experience, and I am
the happier=8Band saner=8Bfor it.

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SUNDAY NIGHT: FUCKERY PART TWO
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Where do we begin.. with the massive lineup waiting to get in? The
anticipation of viewing the set-up of 8 beat geniuses getting ready to
improvise a cacaphony of dance-meltdowns? How about with Robin Judge and
Monolake [Robert Henke] ...

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Toronto's Judge played first-- I say "Toronto's" in a manner only barely, a=
s
she and her rather infamous minimalist muffin Tomas Jirku recently lapped
the country to live in my ex-hometown, Vancouver. Too bad they didn't get
there a year ago-- alas. In any case, Judge, who has only been investigatin=
g
the electronic music game for about two years, showcased a glitched-out and=
,
if I can use these adjectives again, delicately beautiful set of washes and
atmospheres over the 4/4. This was all new material, and I think it
pinpoints a few directions as to where her sound could develop; as it
stands, it doesn't hold the polished poise as her track, for example, on th=
e
Traum compilation [I haven't heard her LP with Jirku on Onitor]. Like
Edmonton's Clinker, she's come far into the game for someone only making
music for about two years; the sort of thing that can make us 10 year +
technoheads a little bitter. But put aside the bitterness: the beats are
coming along, and if the quality is there, spin tha' wax...

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Next was Robert Henke as Monolake, who proceeded to deconstruct, via Ableto=
n
Live--his own designed software--a few of his hallmark & patterned
echo-scapes into the stratospheres of techno-dub. A few moments of hilarity
from the truly genial Henke--he had to ask for a mouse halfway through as
his "trackpad was going crazy"-- in a wonderful German accent, may I add
--and he took the time to thank everyone, noting this was the last night of
Mutek. Sometimes you just need a 6-foot plus, bald, tall and smiling German
guy to remind you to have fun. And for many of us, this was the chance to
see a Monolake we had hunted out, record by record, since 1995. Eight years
ago... And Henke did not disappoint, rocking the casa far, far hard, far,
far gone, and as the drinks were washing down numerous pills in the
audience, the soundsystem--administered by Julien Roy--was put to its
furtherst limits of volume... time to prepare for what was to come: "Narod
Niki."

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According to the Mutek booklet, Narod Niki was a group of "students and
professors who travelled Russia teaching the peasants to read and to
understand the basis of the revolution" (45). Now, I don't know if this is
meant to be revolutionary--all those loops in revolution--or ironic
[ultimately, Russian socialism failed...]. Whatever: Narod Niki was, from
left-to-right: Richie Hawtin, Akufen, Ricardo Villalobos, [master mixer
controller & conductor: either Julien Roy or Robert Henke], Pier Bucci,
Dandy Jack, Luciano, Cabanne and Dan Bell. For those noting, Richie Hawtin =
+
Dan Bell =3D Cybersonik.

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[Name removed by legal counsel] told me how they synced it all together.
Basically, it would have been completely un-synced [beatmatching Ableton
Live] were it not for the fact that Akufen was using a PC laptop, and the
rest were on Mac. The PC laptop has a slight delay from the Macs... thus
they created three groups, each which was running an internal MIDI clock.
These three groups, as far as I could tell, were: Richie + Akufen; Ricardo,
Pier, Dandy Jack, + Luciano; Dan Bell + Cabanne. *I think*. I'm just not
sure, however; needless to say, the groups beatmatched each other, and the
master mixer moved from group to group in the mix.

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In any case.. the result was speaker meltdown. Someone I met was a little
disappointed, saying that although the grouping was legendary, the results
were anything but. I think I have to disagree. I remember at the first Mute=
k
I was disappointed by the live sets; after hearing the speed at which a
talented techno-turntablist can rock records in and out, hearing producers
play their own tracks was admittedly boring. Tracks need to be mixed, and
Mutek is still trying to admit the role of the DJ, the turntablist of beats
and not just phonographic experimentalism. To a degree, I've come to expect
an element of long-track-dancing at Mutek, and accept the changing
parameters of playing from gear, laptops, and so on, as part of the paradig=
m
shift we are undergoing. But since 2001 the technology has also improved to
the point where the producers have begun mixing their own tracks, especiall=
y
vis-=E0-vis programs like Ableton Live. And the producers themselves, those
who are not DJs, have started utlising DJ techniques. Which is not to say
that all producers are good DJs, or for that matter, know how to really
*play* their own work--for often it takes a third party to *interpret*
someone's work... But each up there as part of Narod Niki had such an idea
of how to mix-- although the stand-outs were by far the most talented
turntablists: Richie Hawtin, who stripped everything down, sound-sculpting
the mix, and Dan Bell, who jumped into the repetitious loops of
mindfuck-vocals that made him famous ["I'm losing control...I'm losing
control..."]. Each had their own unique quality--Luciano led into two
much-needed, epic [but not cheesy] breakdowns; Dandy Jack dropped the
4-on-the-floor into what [name removed by legal counsel] called mid-90s Wes=
t
Coast organic breaks; dancing away like mad, his energy infected the crowd
and drove us into orgies of movement... Cabanne worked with Bell on the
tight beats, while Ricardo would open the whole mix into surreal basslines
and vocoder sing-songs .. [only bad part of the night was when they let a
nice lady onto the mic who really, really couldn't sing] ... Akufen's
sliced-and-diced sampledelia would cut through Hawtin's minimalist
sound-sculptures, and everytime his trademark beat-dicing could be heard,
another surge erupted from the crowd .. Richie would look up, smiling and
laughing at Dan--who remained stonefaced the entire time, dead serious--as
Bell pushed the bangin' minimalism; Ricardo would gesture over, pointing ou=
t
who had come into the mix.. it was like a big jazz jam, trading off beats,
winding through various moments, gesturing, conducting, a digital clone of =
a
Sun Ra jam, & at the helm was either Julien Roy or Robert Henke, manning th=
e
master mixer and pushing it as loud as it would fucking go, thudding the
bass--that warm, hard bass, so loud that those in front of the speakers had
both hands over their ears... bleeding loud. It was a little too bad that
Richie's involvement was halved by what seemed to be bad patch-cables.. he
was seen checking his mixer and trying to get it working for what was a goo=
d
hour .. needless to say, when the three hour jam ended at 4am, the crowd
cheering with the lights on, it seemed like we were only just getting
started... indelible memoirs...

Which we were: for then came the afterparty. Richie and Ricardo spinning,
dropping deep acidic techno and Latin minimal house jams... solid thumping.=
..
all chilling, barely awake, more substances consumed, famous journalists
passed out in awkward positions on couches, wild dancing from gum-chewing
label-owners, all that shit I just cannot talk about, Alain Mongeau actuall=
y
smiling and looking relaxed, and finally, after days of cloud & cold, the
sun rising over the echoing streets of Montr=E9al ... enough time out of join=
t
to see a strange post-hippie bike down the street in the oddest of wheeled
caravans ... Mutek 2003 had ended .

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.. notes gathered: 7:12am Monday, 3:48am Wednesday

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tobias c. van Veen

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