The humidity rolled into the city last weekend, as Montreal’s population grew with an influx of tech heads and electronic music enthusiasts visiting for this year’s Mutek. The festival boasted a stacked lineup, with some of the world’s electro pioneers showing face alongside smooth newcomers. There was a palpable energy: enthusiasm saturated the streets.

Each evening found various venues packed to the brim until early AM. Two main venues hosted this year’s festival: Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art (the MAC) and centrally located, swanky mega theatre Metropolis. At the MAC, where mixed-media installations reigned, most spectators stood still with mouths gaping and eyes wide, the odd word uttered to express contentment. At Metropolis, where the vibe was heavily focused on the atmosphere, the party, people moved rather than spoke. Though, few sat solo in the bleachers watching the sea of bodies just below, ebbing and flowing to the techno, the deep house, the minimal. Even the daytime events attracted a wide range of fans: from families to curious teens and tourists who were just checking out the bass booming from behind Place des Arts.

Here are some particularly hot highlights from the 5 days of lush tunes and warm bodies in close proximity:

Aisha Devi played the MAC on opening night. The crowd was sparse but her performance definitely made up for it, filling the space with a wall of layer vocals. Her visuals evoked a vapour wave, mall soft vibe: geometric shapes, half naked bodies, bright colours, images of the sea. Her voice delicately swam and took center stage as she sang to her ancestors, her music heavily influenced by familial relations and places she’s lived. The stage was later cleared for Moritz Von Oswald, who sat unaccompanied in front of a laptop on a leather office chair: no frills. Frankly, he looked animatronic, bored almost. His lack of expression and lassiez-faire movements seemed to intrigue the crowd: the spectator/audience relationship was broken momentarily as people curiously snuck up to the side of the stage. “Who is this guy?” was uttered several times, and the people who knew ignored the question and continued dancing along to his dark dub.

Canada’s own Tim Hecker ‘s intricate light installation expanded the minds of Thursday’s crowd. Cascading glass beams of colour hung at the front of the room, shifting shades to accompany his minimal, ambient set. A heavy layer of smoke hung over the crowded room. Hecker’s soft sounds mimicked field recordings, with hushed tones and sharp pulses that elicited an imagined soundscape from a Sci-Fi rainforest. Swedish born Peder Mannerfelt’s set was a trip, taking over the basement of the MAC. A long blonde wig covered his face like a mask, adding to an already eerie vibe that his goth electro evokes. Behind him, a giant screen projected his image on repeat, bright colours oscillated alongside his cosmic synth meltdowns and bass-heavy buffering. His performance left the crowd blurry eyed and dizzy, wandering into the night like zombies on the prowl for fresh meat.

Lakker’s Friday night set at Metropolis was astonishing, one of the best of the festival. The noise duo from Dublin owned the large space, sending the crowd into a giddy frenzy with good reason. Their techno harnesses an industrial, post-apocalyptic vibe, mixing in sensitive, pure points of vivid sounds. They don’t try to fit into any club-music category, creating a space in electronic production that is both dissonant and harmonious. Dasha Rush took a different approach, with a paired-down performance that was sophisticated and mellow. Rush is an extraordinary producer, and her live sets exceed her production. She knows how to harness the noiseless noises, the silences, the empty spaces that are crucial in techno music. Although Metropolis as a venue did no favours to her sound, she reined in the crowd with her purring, her drawling, her humming: and of course, the boom of the bass.

The Boiler Room event at the Satosphere on Sunday was the ultimate wind-down to five days of music. The space’s design is dream-like, with a screen that stretches as a dome over the dance floor. Sepalcure’s set focused heavily on melody and vocals, tying in some bouncy UK garage to keep the crowd bumping. Iron Galaxy played to his strengths: his performance was clean with indie-electro beats, harmonious house melodies and flawless mixing. Martyn started off slow, carefully building his soundscape to match the depth of the room. His synth twinkled as the crowd crooked their necks towards the ceiling to watch the work of the VJ. Casually, Martyn picked up momentum, and the focus quickly shifted from the screen to the floor. A mixture of bass heavy music with a touch of techno, his set was one of the most eclectic of the weekend. 

Rounding of the party for one of the finest acts of Mutek, was local Project Pablo’s live set. It was, for lack of a better word, perfect. Swaying his head from side to side, clad in baseball cap, he sailed between his hardware and keyboard, twisting knobs that released chirpy, high pitched tones over shimmering refrains. Showcasing an incredibly intimate nu-disco performance, Project Pablo has a swanky style with just the right bit of edge. His sound is chilled out: down tempo that still makes you want to dance. His music is sexy without being salacious: it is well-crafted and well-informed in both production and performance. His tunes were the ultimate night-cap, sending tired spectators tenderly back out into the real world and leaving behind their dreams of Mutek.

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The energy level of Takami Nakamoto and Sebastien Benoits’s “Reflections” performance was on par with being in a sold-out concert with Benoits’s live, hard-hitting drumming on a full acoustic drum set and Nakamoto’s high-energy body movements while programming and manually manipulating the sound effects. I had seen Nakamoto at last year’s EM15, who was performing as NONOTAK with Noemi Schipfer in the A/Visions, and he consistently brings to the stage that full-force energy which greatly adds to the whole set. The music consisted of hard drumming with an industrial/reverb effect, and EDM beats that left the whole audience cheering and dancing. Of course, I cannot go without stating that their lighting set-up with the row of flashing, vertically and spatially placed, fluorescent tubes, alongside heavy, synchronised, white strobe lights placed on either side of Nakamoto and Benoits, was visually the perfect lighting set-up to match their sound.

Lumisokea’s set was an alluring and menacing experience with their heavy, trembling industrial and mechanical sampling and effects and their mainly triangular, green projections that descended from the stage downwards, onto and through the audience. The projection fell in a slim horizontal layer of light, so as it projected downwards onto the crowd, it had the very captivating effect as if the audience was being scanned in mass. These projections, along with the increasingly rhythmic, bass-driven, harsh break beats, were definitely a means to cause the audience to experience their performance in visual entrancement.

At the specially located Théâtre Maisonneuve quipped with its large screen, Maotik and Metametric’s “Omnis” struck the audience with geometric brilliance, taking everyone first on a spatial journey on screen and inside a winding tunnel, then to a space of cubic particles, and finally through a maze of industrial-like rooms of pipes. The opening of “Omnis” started off with one swift hit on a gong and progressed with ambient sounds, which were met with manual effects on a large bass drum in perfect timing to the visuals on screen. The visual transition to the room of long, industrial pipes was the turning point for the sounds to become intensified with loud effects, as though the steel pipes were gliding against each other and another moment where it sounded as if fluorescent tubes of light were shattering and exploding. The visual for me that immediately put me in awe was the large, 3D creature, resembling the merged structure of a butterfly/bird that flew into the room of steel pipes and had the appearance of ominously looking onto the audience as its wings were in motion.

The second performance in the A/Visions 1  was the absolutely magnificent choreography from Hiroaki Umeda. The A/Visions specifically presents artists with audio-visuals that are extremely creative and provide the audience with the means to feel 150% enthralled and in rapture of the artists’ work, and Umeda’s performance could not have fit this description any better. He started off dancing slowly in complete silence, meticulously and fluidly curving his body, but not long after and in increasing tempos, Umeda transforms his body both into a malleable and robotic form, breakdancing into every beat of the mechanical, glitch-based soundtrack. Watching Umeda do this alone with the sound effects would have already been enough to excite the audience, but he furthered and outdoes the visuals by spectacularly projecting stardust, white noise/transmission static, and segmented RBG strobe overlays onto his body, which in sequence of the glitch-based sounds at times differed from the projection on the screen behind him. But it is in the rapidness of his motions to match the high-speed sounds that made his performance unparalleled. Umeda’s choreography tests and breaks the limits our human capacity to move so intensely and strategically, all at inhuman speeds.

The selected performances in this year’s MUTEK have truly been an incredible pleasure to witness by some of the most talented, creative and exceptional audio-visual artists. You are surely missing out on experiencing the astonishing level of creativity and production if you haven’t gone to MUTEK yet!

Images by  Trung Dung Nguyen & Caroline Hayeur for MUTEK

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