Grooves Magazine - Mutek 2007 Festival Review

Mutek Festival 2007

Various Venues, Montreal

May 30-June 3, 2007

In my Internet travels prior to my trip to this year’s Mutek festival, I had heard mixed opinions. For every “the lineup looks incredible,” there was “the lineup looks unremarkable” when compared to this or that previous year. Once I arrived, gray rain clouds gave Montreal’s streets and funky cul-de-sacs a moody vibe. But far from spoiling the festival, the threat of rain and the choice of new names over big names proved to make this installment of Mutek something of a winning underdog.

Day One: 5/30/2007

Nocturne 1 on Wednesday set a light tone coming out of the gate. Billed as “humour et kitsch électronique” (“electronic humor and kitsch”), it kicked off with animated works selected by Pictoplasma. Pero and the Electric Machine played its circuit-bent ’80s-influenced pop music to a mixed reaction. The set of the night was delivered by Gangpol & Mit, whose cartoonish psychedelic audiovisual onslaught won the room’s respect from the first manic note. Two incredibly silly Frenchmen hopped up and down, wore strange hats, played toy instruments on top of the speaker stacks, or made a live puppet show by playing with paper dolls in front of a laptop webcam. Regression to a simpler time? Or a punk-rock-style attack on the structure of our world? Whatever the set was, it moved the audience.

After this novel spectacle, Candie Hank (pictured above) had a pretty daunting task. While he was energetic, the tracks he played didn’t sound like news to much of the audience, and we really didn’t need between-song soliloquies about his hair. By the time the skilled micro-edit beats of O.Lamm were blazing over the speakers, most of the crowd had lost interest and left the club—a great shame, since his work deserves a wider audience. I can’t help thinking that his set would have rocked the whole crowd if it had been placed earlier. And Hank may actually have been a perfect post-brain-melt closing act for the night.

Day Two: 5/31/2007

Thursday’s A/Visions at Ex-Centris was an engaging show, one I’m glad I didn’t miss. Mark Templeton and Aaron Munson opened the event with a set of music presumably from Templeton’s upcoming release on Ezekiel Honig’s Anticipate label. On the big screen, Munson seemed to be distressing a film loop in real time to create a multilayered cinematic scratch symphony, complete with magic marker colors to add emotional resonance to the snaky jumpy lines. Templeton’s meditative guitar loop work, while often less jumpy than the film, worked in pleasingly loose harmony with it. The only question was what Templeton has to add to the genre of DSP-sculpted guitar music, since, soundwise, comparisons to Fennesz and Christopher Willits were unavoidable.

Even if you had your eyes closed, you would be able to tell that the music of Colleen was not another “man + machines” set. Her beautiful multilayered electroacoustic loop compositions trembled and rose and fell, and people sat in rapt attention. She overcame multiple technical difficulties with soft humor. When all was in order, she opened up her world patiently for the audience as she picked up and put down a wide array of instruments. Her palette was mainly composed of clarinet, wind chimes, guitar, wind-up music box, and a custom cello with baritone strings. Apart from mild complaints here and there from instrumental musicians (e.g., “her bow attack on the cello hurts me...”), most people in the audience were spellbound.

Haushka vs. Semiconductor were likewise brilliant. The prepared piano recordings of German born musician Volker Bertelmann (as Hauschka) had already intrigued me, and seeing him perform live was one of my main goals in coming to Mutek. The geometric sound visualizations of Semiconductor reacted in real-time to Bertelmann’s stacatto piano textures as they hopped and rattled. On the piano, different keys had radically different treatments, some sounding like woodblock percussion, allowing Bertelmann to play rhythmic figures as well as tones. A bit like a one-man percussion ensemble, Haushka’s passion, humor and pathos came forward clearly and naturally, and his interest in polyrhythm as well as polytonality kept it from sounding like a gimmick.