Mutek Festival's First Days Fill Montreal With Strange Sounds

Coming to Mutek feels like leaving the planet. Or at least North America. For four days here, experimental electronic music — that buzzing, throbbing, piercing, sensible-level-of-bass-shattering sound — isn't related to the fringes, it's celebrated across the city. Ads for the festival play in the subway and banners decorate the streets. A aptop toted under an arm instead of a guitar case is the sign of a musician in your midst. Unlike other festivals, where stamina is judged by how many acts you can watch in a day while still working on last night's hangover, Mutek might ask you to stand and listen to one frequency for an hour, but it will reward you later with body-moving beats.

The ninth edition kicked off somewhat gently on Wednesday, May 28 with the A/Visions 3 program at the plush Theatre du Nouveau-Monde, headlined by Mexico's Murcof. These sit-down shows do much to dispel the idea that laptop performances are boring to watch by pairing musical acts with cutting-edge digital video artists. First came the U.S. duo of Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, who presented mind-melting loops of art and sound, which culminated in a surprise encore with saxophone, accordion and a chorus of invisible birds. This was just the kind of playfully stimulating combo that could bring a wide audience to this kind of experimentation. It's too bad the next act, Canada's Nicolas Bernier, came off as Mr. Art Grant. His haunting yet uninspired electro-acoustic composition "Les Arbres" — for cello, violin and xylophone! — was as unsatisfying as his video collage. Thankfully, Murcof came to the rescue with a live presentation of his latest Cosmos disc that reached out and grabbed your brain and body. The first punishing blast of sound felt like he was opening a hellmouth, unleashing ghosts from his machines, but his melodies gradually worked their way into a deep, dark trance that set the rest of the fest up well.

If this still sounds like just an art gallery muzo scene, Mutek does much to draw in newcomers, particularly with free programming. Their OpenLab series is worth a drop-in. Twelve hours of almost non-stop free music is presented in a dark room filled with headphones, not speakers. When you first walk in, you don't know what awaits until you sit down and strap in. Thursday afternoon included the sci-fi sounds of Canada's I8U. Her half-hour set started with what sounded like staticky errors that segued into a relaxing wave of pulses and pings. If robots had wombs, this is what it would sound like in them. Next, veteran Canadian composer David Kristian ratcheted things up a notch with sophisticated, yet child-like layers of ambience punctuated by music box fantasy. All OpenLab programming can be heard streaming live on the web here.

Thursday night's Nocturne 2 program at the S.A.T. presented many questions:

Is Artificiel (Canada's Martin Tetreault) playing a cement mixer? (No, but his noisy experiments in turntabalism sure sounded like it until they smoothed out into hypnotic grooves.)

Why are so many girls here? (They like designer sneakers, the festival accessory of choice.)

Are Chilean experimental techno star Cristian Vogel's teasing, threatening beats ever going to burst into the full-on dance party the rave-deprived crowd so clearly yearned for? (Just barely.)

And what of headliner Sleeparchive from Germany? Does he know another tempo? (No.) But the pounding, if challenging rhythms set the stage for Mutek's weekend programming, where the fun stuff really kicks in.

This weekend, a star-studded bill at the Metropolis club featuring Kid Koala, Megasoid, Knifehandchop and the crowd-pleasing, genre-bending Modeselektor, followed by Saturday's world famous Piknic Electronic with Flying Lotus and dubstep masters Kode 9. These shows will no doubt pull in many paying punters, but to skip the more avant garde programming is to miss what makes Mutek so special, the only event of its kind in North America. So drop in to Open Lab, with Argentina's Barem or the final A/Visions programme to see our own Tim Hecker back-to-back with Austria's Christian Fennesz. Then, with your head filled with the magic mash-up of technology, art, science and music, you'll be fuelled for the late-night festivities.