Mutek Festival Teaches Appreciation For Innovation

Various venues

Montreal, QC

on May 27 2008

Erik Leijon (CHARTattack)

06/03/2009 3:38pm

Montreal's electronic music festival and avant garde audiovisual juggernaut Mutek is as much about the people who attend the week's many shows as it is the shadowy performers on stage.

The festival has an understandably limited appeal and the shows often seem only tangentially related to music and/or visual arts. In truth, Mutek — in its 10th iteration this year — is more a celebration of the laid-back, postmodern art fan and the neverending search of the cool.

As evidenced by two of the festival's more dance-friendly shows — The Bounce Le Monde Friday night showcase at Metropolis and the Sunday afternoon outdoor marathon shindig Mutek//Piknic 2 — Mutek is at once very heterogenous and diverse, yet rather resolute in the organizers' desire for a more fulfilling social spectacle than your traditional rock show.

Perhaps you've noticed, but the archetype 21st century concertgoer is a repulsive sort. Modern concertgoers are more interested in taking unsteady-handed cellphone videos and opining their unfiltered thoughts via Twitter at every moment, and are typically more interested in themselves than the actual performers.

Since the cachet of bragging to your friends afterward about how awesome Berlin pop electronic act Jahcoozi's Euro-electronica-meets-disco vamp set will fall on deaf ears outside the walls of Metropolis, Mutek and its dedicated patrons exist in a self-sustaining bubble, where everyone on the inside knows the giddy thrill of dancing at your own pace without being self-conscious, and everyone on the outside are ultimately irrelevant.

Bounce Le Monde, named after Montreal DJ Ghislain Poirier's late and great Bounce Le Gros dance party sessions, reflected Poirier's keen interest in Caribbean-style dance music. His 2007 full-length album, No Ground Under, was pure dancehall reggae, while his recent EP is steeped in soca dance music.

The nearly clean-shaven and hatless Poirier was virtually unrecognizable without his trademark scraggly facial hair, although a few literal air horn blasts into his international colours of hip-hop set got residents of the fairly spacious Metropolis dancefloor to start moving.

Armed with a live drummer and dancehall singer Face-T, Poirier didn't skimp on the venue-shattering bass, even at one point asking the crowd if they wanted more bass, only to turn the brain-swelling thumping on overdrive. The stage design recalled the bridge of the Enterprise in the new Star Trek film, with a background wall of hanging screens of unnatural colours and angular edges, befitting the event's already spectacular looking logo and palette.

This wasn't your traditional dance-friendly Friday night crew — beyond a few well-dressed individuals the crowd looked like your typical Mutek gathering — middle-aged men with preggo beer bellies, old stock french couples, funky sunglasses everywhere, and the odd fluorescent fashion faux-pas. Better that motley crew than the cellphone dependents and fashionably stationary, though.

Poirier may not slide effortlessly into a generic Friday night DJ's playlist, although his ability to experiment incorporate soca, Haitian and dancehall music genres with a traditional hip-hop backbeats makes him a sort of Van Morrison of dance music: casting a wide net of appeal while remaining loyal to purists.

Ricardo Villalobos is the pre-eminent name in the world of minimalist dance music. The Chilean-born DJ doesn't perform in the United States for political and likely financial reasons, so his rare visit for a seven-hour duelling marathon with German DJ Zip was an event worth braving the elements for.

It was held on a rainy, windy and downright chilly afternoon underneath the large metal structure on Parc Jean-Drapeau, and an even more casual set of music fans danced in close quarters and without respite as the two DJs spun on an elevated booth which rocked perilously due to the wind. At first, proceedings were pretty loose, as the diversely aged audience sipped on cocktails and bobbed in place to the enveloping beats.

Sometime during hour three, though, the rain and wind started to pick up, and the temperature dropped below 10 degrees celsius. Yet, in an act of solidarity indicative of the type of person who attends a Mutek show, not only did nobody leave for the warmer confines of the indoor Metro shelter, but everyone became even more enraptured with Villalobos' and Zip's increasingly less-minimal beats, and danced with more fervour and eagerly shouting their approval and raising their fists when the two grinning DJs built up their jigsaw beats to thrilling climaxes.

The scene was something like that one in The Matrix Reloaded, where the last harbingers of freedom danced away in Zion. A few hundred music fans danced in every style possible — from the arms akimbo to all-out appendage waving — fully invested in the beat, camaraderie and little else.

This total abandon is essential to the enjoyment of the festival more than regular concerts because Mutek's great calling card has always been the ardent passion of its community.

After 10 years, Mutek hasn't become some grand, all-expansive event on par with, say, the Montreal Jazz Fest, and thankfully so. It also hasn't developed the type of sex appeal designed to attract those not truly in love with Mutek 's own unique typography. It's bigger, and will continue to grow as technological convergence becomes second nature to us all, but for now the primitive and animalistic beats reimagined with every artistic gadget available will be celebrated by those strictly in the know.

I guess the point of all this comparative crowd study is a decade ago Mutek-type minimal electronic fans were considered the rigid elitists and rock music fans the all-encompassing, inclusive types. A decade later, tables have turned, and now the progressive, passionate electro fan finds his/her realm a more fertile ground for fun than the fascist forces currently ruling over indie rock with an iron fist.