Event organizers are looking for the following:

• Unpublished live musical performances, mainly electronic
• Innovative digital audiovisual performances that explore the relationship between image and sound
• Virtual augmented or mixed reality works whose themes and artistic treatment are close to the MUTEK universe
• Any other type of project that pushes the limits of digital creation or uses innovative technologies

Follow this link to submit a project.

Follow this link for more information.

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Another MUTEK season wrapped up last weekend featuring the best in alternative electronic music and digital arts across various venues of Montreal. Each venue featured a set of themed curated performances from across the globe. Here are some of our highlights.

INTER CONNECT México brought together Omaar and Mexican Jihad on the ground level of SAT. The room atmosphere took the crowd back to  Mexico City’s underground after hours, filled with people dancing to the grimy and heavy bass.

Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) took over NOCTURNE 3 for a much deeper and darker performances by Deathprod, Norwegian musician and producer. Lit by a single spotlight at first, Deathprod had the entire Metropolis in pitch dark playing what sounded like an organ, creating a horror movie atmosphere.

Barcelona also brought together a set of artists for the INTER CONNECT on the second night. Filastine and Nova from Barcelona presented Drapetomania, a mix of contemporary Indonesian sound (Nova) intertwined  with electronic music. Their visuals were quite interesting as well, engaging most senses in an organic multimedia experience.

Aurora Halal performed for RBMA Montreal showcase at the Metropolis [cover]. The venue was packed with people mesmerized by psychedelic techno and hard-to-look-away from visuals. The weekend wrapped up with DJ Nomad at the open stage near Place des Arts where he played a combination of tropical sounds highly influenced by African, Caribbean and Latin influences, occasionally stirred by techno, creating an exotic ambience. As his name suggests it, this DJ seems to have been everywhere and took the audience on tropical journey along with him.

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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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Of the artists listed, Cabaal and Clément’s – both of whom are Montreal natives – performance held my interest most. Cabaal (Ben Globerman) was the first artist of Nocturne 1 and set the bar with an hour-long, provocative, stellar-influenced performance. The beginning of Cabaal’s set was incredibly enthralling with an atmospheric introduction of deep, bass-filled vibrations coupled with astral, ambient sounds, and red floodlights that shone through a layer of fog. There were no visual projections that accompanied his set, which I greatly appreciated; only Cabaal illuminated by the haze of red from behind him. Visually, this brought his live performance to a more heightened experience. Any sort of projection would otherwise have taken away from experiencing his music.

His set was such that I couldn’t exactly predict where his music would lead to next as there were continuous turns into slightly different musical directions, transitioning from the space-ambient sampling and manual arpeggiations of sounds to quickened hi-hat tempos to more brighter synth beats and then to full-on club percussive beats. However, his overall performance was still cohesive in the end with the recurring bass beats that make your spine shiver. As an audience/listener, cohesiveness in this type of EDM performance is what you really hope to experience. What particularly made his live performance excitable for me was the venue-shaking heavy bass beats that progressed after the ambient segment started to build. The contrast in sound was irrefutably refreshing and enjoyable, and Cabaal’s live performance was definitely a gratifying aural exploration.

Hugues Clément’s new work, Dichotomie, was a much more sophisticated approach and development of his style in juxtaposing dualities. The last time I had seen his live video work was at Igloofest in early 2014, where his video work was evident of contrasted forms between classical and formalism art. In a year and half’s time, it is clear that Clément has really explored more complex and refined graphic manipulations to not only further his visual and conceptual theme of the organic (truth) versus the digital (deception), but to also to comment on these visual manipulations that are heavily reflected in the 21^st century, as seen through media and social acceptance/encouragement of falsified imagery.

The first half of his 30-minute video was the portion that I found visually entrancing with moving natural landscapes and 3D geometric forms that overlay and perpetuate within the scenery – such as the imagery of the pond amid the bleak, dead-winter field and a black, pulsating, 3D form with synchronised, black, spherical dots expanding outwards along to the heavy beats of the background music. The other extremely well done motion graphics was the flashing, geometric, fluorescent tube structure in a darkly-lit, digitally-created forest, the empty, black space with a large, disk of frail, white dust particles flying into the abyss, and the haunting, slow-motion dreamscape of cotton weeds, slowly blossoming with translucent flashes of red/purple hues.

The second half of Clément’s set revealed the explicit commentary of appearance in media, questioning what is beauty through the use of collaged imagery, such as mannequin hands, magazine covers, burgers, and a repeated, large advert of “Are you beach-body ready?” Although the two segments of Dichotomie were perhaps visually on polar ends, the exploration of the natural versus manipulation was made astoundingly clear and it is a pleasure to see the transformation of Clément’s graphic/motion video work.

Images by Trung Dung Nguyen & Kamielle Dalati-Vachon for MUTEK

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Three performances. Second night of EM15. One astonished girl. EM15’s A/VISIONS 1 has been the most creative line-up of performers I have seen thus far. This three-hour event which ran on May 28^th from roughly between 7:30 PM to 10:30 PM at Cinéma Impérial was a sold-out show with Mantra Percussion, Nicolas Bernier/Martin Messier, and Nonotak, and for a good reason. Let’s paint this jaw-dropping, visual and aural experience from the perspective of one who got there early enough to get a front-row seat.

Mantra Percussion, a six-man group from New York, was the first act of the evening, performing “Timber” with their hexagonal instruments comprised of what appeared to be 2 x 4 lumber of different lengths. The wood pieces are the platform of their sound creation and are laid horizontally and propped up from the floor at hip-length. Colourful strobe lights lay at the feet of the stands on each side, matching the tempo of their drumming. If the sound of a construction site with men hammering on wood was what you were expecting, it would not be the case for “Timber.” Instead, the audience gets intrigued by an echoing, rainforest-meets-tribal soundscape.

Using what looked to be bass drum mallets as well as their own hands and sound effect pedals as a means to generate the sound, their set was a manifestation of how human hearing functions: the dynamics of sound being heard from afar versus being heard within close range via the distance and placement of where they were drumming on the wood. The closer to the middle that they drummed the more vibrant and concentrated the sound. Whereas, the farther they drummed towards the ends of the wood, the more panned and distant the sound became (eg. think of your ear drum being at the center of the wood panel and your ears being at the ends).

At the beginning, all members were drumming at same time, but transitionally, they began to use their circular position surrounding their hexagonal instrument by means of playing one after the other repetitively which intensified their sound. With their progressive and varying intensities, speeds and sequences of each member drumming, you can imagine the swirling effect of the sounds panning in and out, as if going through a reverb-filled vortex.

Along the lines of incorporating wood into their performance (but on a completely different level and scope) was the work of Montreal-based Martin Messier and Nicolas Bernier, MACHINE_VARIATION. The ingenuity of their wooden/industrial machine – an incredible structural piece on its own – was personally the most eye-widening and jaw-dropping sculpture put into action I have ever witnessed. The sheer performing aspect of Messier and Bernier as they come onto stage with a determined composure and act as one with their machine was quite the experience. This massive, rotatable structure on stage – designed to perfection and comprised of long, wooden beams fixed together in a criss-cross arrangement, with metal rods, hooks, and vertical wires all operating cohesively – already has the audience captivated. But, when the sounds of feedback and mechanical processing start, so does the mechanical operation of Messier and Bernier.

It truly is a physical performance to undergo for both performers and also gets you to the point of not being able to blink for fear of missing one of their very rigid and addictive movements. Both pull, lift, shake, and slam the moveable, wooden levers fiercely and with such timely precision along with the sequencing of sounds that you really believe the structure they built is an extension of themselves. I definitely commend them as I would assume that with such force and constant grabbing and slamming of the wooden pieces, they would have handfuls of blisters. Their physical performance alone of constantly being in motion and walking towards different areas of their structure was impressive and you can see the sweat building and their bodies becoming slightly overworked – a perfect way to get fit and perform an astonishing work of art.

The final performance, LATE SPECULATION, was nothing short of spectacular. Paris-based, Nonotak, presented audio-synced projections through opposing projectors, while operating techno-glitch music inside triangular-prism-shaped screens. With one of the screens facing frontally for the audience to view and the two other sides receding into the back of the stage, various white geometric patterning, flashing, sliding side-to-side, inwards and outwards, as well as an array of neon green horizontal lines segmenting the screen, created a digital, rave-infused atmosphere. It’s an interesting concept to watch sound designer, Takami Nakamoto, and visual artist, Noemi Schipher, literally inside their own creative zone and dancing to their work (Nakamoto controlling the beats, of course, doing the majority of dancing), while the audience watches them.

Their performance is the type that can be enjoyed and appreciated from both the audience and the performer’s point of view. From the audience viewing, it’s a visual pleasure in our modern age to watch digital projections flashing and syncing to music that will, at the least, make you tap your feet to the beat if not have you dancing in your seat. But surely it’s an energetic and sublime feeling to be the performer in the center of the projected lights that encompass the work space.

The performances in A/VISIONS 1 are exactly the kind of line-up that is expected from MUTEK and ELEKTRA’s festival – the type to blow your mind with the creativity and originality of artists.

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PARA_VISIONS 1: FOG WORKS kicked off the opening night of this year’s EM15 with a sensory explosion. The sole performing artist of this event, Tim Hecker, held the first of two sonic performances in the wonderful space at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal on May 27^th, performing almost back-to-back, hour long sets, at 8:30 and 11pm.

PARA_VISIONS could not have been a better event name as Hecker’s work certainly went far “beyond” regular aural and visual expectation. As the crowd gathers into the room – the space already dark with soft, ambient streams of spotlights, spread variously around from a 30 foot ceiling – the fog grows increasingly thick and the spotlights start to fade less and less as Hecker’s performance starts.

The sounds begin and so does the pure, audio engulfment. The volume of the sounds and the strength of the vibration from which it trembled from the speakers through the floors – and what felt like was shaking and piercing your very existence – was the most astounding feeling the art of sound can ever bring to you.

Most of the room (myself included) chose to sit on the carpeted floor where the vibration was at its strongest. Entranced by the thick fog and captivated by the intensity and industrial ambience of Hecker’s audio, it almost seemed as if the audience is part of an A.I. entity being freed from bondage. It’s quite bewildering because as the volume of the sound starts to seep in through your ears and through your body, you could try to look at everyone around you and it would appear as if they were just a sea of blurred bodies, and this fog and whirring, pulsating sound surrounding you is all you really can feel. Hecker’s work becomes this intensely saturated soundscape that will put you, irrevocably, in a zone of heightened meditation.

If machines could talk, Hecker would have provided their resonating voices and rapturous existence – all which could be felt from that night’s PARA_VISIONS performance.

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The festival is dedicated to promoting and connecting electronic music with digital art. It is one of the leading events in North America and has sprung up in other countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. In simple terms, however, this is an EDM festival that absorbs you inside out through sounds and incredible visual installations.

Within the allotted five days each sub-category of the main event offered an average of five shows. Daytime shows, Experience 1-5 and Play 1-4, offered more of a cocktail vibe, allowing you to grab a drink, tune in, and hash out that intellectual conversation you otherwise could not express in any ordinary concert environment. Once the conversation dried up, you were free to join whatever deep and dark performance you liked.

The city’s favourite performance venue Société des Arts Technologiques was transformed into the home to DROMOS, a special project showing a variety of artwork throughout the day and night that allowed the viewers to interact with the created data built by Montreal’s own Moment Factory. With viewers reclined, drinks in hand, DROMOS became a highlight of the festival with streams of colour and waves of sound–a real-time immersive performance.

As each day’s performance filtered into the night, we were met with A/Visions 1-5 and Nocturnes 1-5.  While A/Visions presented itself with more of a lounge vibe, Nocturnes started at around 10 pm and went on to pretty much sunrise. Ninja Tune and Red Bull Music Academy took the reins on the music selection, bringing forth live performances by the likes of Jesse Bru, Lukid, Emika, Onra, Nosaj Thing, and Britain’s Letherette.

The technical foundation of the festival allowed for incredible, in-tune, curated A/V displays. Jon Hopkins shared with the world his new visually stunning technical backdrop. Martyn inflated his heart for everyone to see as a projection foundation while Âme’s Frank Wiedemann re-imagined the space with some serious stadium-range psychedelic lasers. Having that much to look at certainly takes away from people’s desire to dance, but that didn’t stop the crowd from fist-pumping and dropping a move or two.

The last Nocturne wrapped up MUTEK with a bang as Pantha du Prince & The Bell Laboratory, who created an intense interactive atmosphere with technically complex and mesmerising notes. This proved to be nearly everyone’s favourite show, audience members chiming in with great applause.

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Referring to his sound as “sample-based midtempo house,” it’s clear that, despite his relatively recent entry into the underground music scene Jesse belongs there. After living in Montreal for two years and trying his hand at MCing, he spent some time at Mutek as a fan and “it was a huge influence, it made me want to get more into producing and move away from MCing, for the time being, at least.”

Now he lives in Vancouver and is a part of the electronic duo Hot Keys, although “that is on the backburner for now, but we still have about a dozen songs ready to release whenever we get around to it.” Instead he’s in school, perfecting his craft while studying sound design and audio engineering. When you are relying on “found-sound,” and putting out “sample-heavy” beats with material often culled from YouTube, it’s important to know how to play with what you got. His recent invite to return to Mutek as a performer is proof that Jesse knows how to play around with the best of them.

“There is definitely a sound quality difference between pulling something off of vinyl and pulling something from YouTube,” he admits, “but at the end of the day most of the samples are such a small part of the final product it doesn’t really matter.” To listen to the tracks on his debut album, Midcity, it is A) obvious that his samples really do “come from everywhere,” and B) impossible to tell from whence they came. That’s the mark of a true soundsmith.

Besides the clear influence of hip-hop, where Jesse got his beginnings, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what to call his genre. For now, “sample-based midtempo house” will have to do. “I just like to keep it below 115 beats-per-minute,” he says.

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Earlier this year Hopkins released his most recent solo album, Immunity, that has already gotten praise for being one of the best dance albums to see this world in 2013. With those winds on his sails Hopkins is heading out on a tour with the next stop being appropriately nothing other than Montreal’s electronic music festival MUTEK. We got a chance to catch up with Hopkins to talk about his inspiration and music process.

Kateryna Topol:  Immunity is a much more dramatic dance album, how did that decisions come about?

Jon Hopkins: I don’t actually make any conscious decisions when I’m writing – I just kind of see what comes out. Looking back on it with a bit of perspective now I think it’s likely that I was being influenced by the experiences I had on the road touring with  Insides. My set for that album gradually evolved into a dancier thing as I was learning what worked in a club environment.

KT: This album feels more personal and almost revealing, would you say that this album is a step towards you defining your solo career? 

JH: That’s a hard question to answer – all I do really is keep writing and see what comes out. From my perspective, it seems to sound more coherent, and more like one body of work, whereas previous albums I’ve done have felt a bit more disjointed. However, all my records I would say are equally personal, maybe just as I have gotten older I have learnt more about how to put this across.

KT: Your inspiration comes from very uncalled for places (like salt and pepper shakers), how do you turn the random inspirations into cohesive songs? 

JH: I always start with one sound – whether it’s a beat I’ve drummed on something, or a synth sound, or the piano, or some crazy effects patch I’ve made in the computer. Then I just work on instinct from that point onwards – adding what I think is needed to bring the track to life. With solo albums I like to take more time per track than I ever get to spend when I’m doing film scores or collaborations  – I like to nurture and build tracks over a long time, leaving them when I feel they need space, coming back to them when I’m inspired again.

KT: Can you please tell us a little about the development of the audiovisual show for the Village Underground gig?

JH: I’ve been working with a talented audiovisual artist called Dan Tombs. He has been combining clips of his own making with some of the microscopic time-lapse photography by Linden Gledhill (from my recent collaboration with The Creators Project). The results are looking amazing. I mostly let him get on with it but will occasionally chip in to make points about certain colours not going with certain tracks – I have quite precise and strange ideas about colours as I see my tracks in quite specific ways.

KT: Do you intend to take the audiovisual portion on the road for the entire album tour or to MUTEK? 

JH: Yes, Dan will be joining me at specific shows, including MUTEK. Whenever possible I will be bringing him, but quite often there isn’t the budget or the equipment. I have put a lot of work into making sure the show works just as well without visuals.

KT: Are you at all inspired by other people’s music?

JH: Yes, definitely. Everything I hear seeps into my brain, and I sometimes notice ideas on tracks that I have finished which I can relate back to a certain artist. Though I think everything goes through my personal filter so, hopefully, these inspirations aren’t too clear. Recently, I really loved the Darkstar album – it’s so beautiful and surprising – I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t that. Also, i’m always fascinated by the stuff Jamie XX produces.

KT: You’ve played shows in quite a few atypical concert venues, what is your ultimate favorite concert venue and why? 

JH: Each venue is such a different experience – playing at The Berghain one week and then an opera theatre in Bologna the week after was amazing. I loved Sydney Opera House – acoustics aren’t brilliant, but it’s such an incredible space and you can kind of feel how iconic it is from inside.

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This year’s festival of music and technology, Mutek, showcased some of the most eclectic and talented electronic and underground artists in the world. Of course, this doesn’t come as a surprise; this past weekend was Mutek’s 14th rodeo (as in, far from their first).

While the weather did it’s best to ruin the event, the event-holders took it in stride and moved many of the rained out DJ sets indoors to the SAT (La société des arts technologiques).

The move inside took a little of the festival vibe away from the proceedings on Saturday, but admirably replaced it with one hell of a club scene thanks to the blaring neon lights and blasting speakers.

The festival isn’t exclusively about the music, though; the technology aspect is not to be overlooked. That’s why the organizers provided workshops discussing high-level computing, Q&A sessions with established yet independent artists, and even a program for kids that integrated cutting edge audio-visual technology.

With such clear dedication to providing entertainment for all, it’s no wonder that the weather cleared up on Sunday, just in time for Mutek to combine with Piknik Electronik and rock Montréal’s collective face off.

Yes, electronic music is alive and well in the city, and with festivals like Mutek continuing to educate the masses as to its potential, the beats are only going to get bigger and better.

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