mutek 2024

Ten years after my run at Mutek in 2014, some highlights, in no real order:

Colin Stetson on solo saxophone is pretty incredible — circular breathing for minutes at a time, singing via a throat mike, percussion via taps on the saxophone and the keys, etc. I don’t know if I 100% loved the music, but there was nothing with as much chops in the entire festival.

One day, I will work (work it!) as hard as Marie Davidson, but not today. A great live set to a really wonderful local crowd.

There was, secret, a fashion festival going on at the same time, on the other side of Place Des Arts, which I didn’t even notice until Thursday night. It had two stages, one with a catwalk, and this one — with frankly terrible sound, maybe a dozen people maximum — but with every one of them losing their heads to Jersey club, dancehall, trap, a zouk record, etc. I deadpanned “well, that kind of put Mutek in the dumpster”, and, you know, I was not wrong. Except for …

ZORA JONES + SINJIN HAWKE, and the giant projectors of the SAT-O-SPHERE, which saved the day multiple times. It turns out that a kinect plus some spikes looks amazing on a very big dome – to say nothing of a gopro video from the head of golden eagle.

and, totally different, Cobblestone Jazz were great — pictured here in an extended closing solo from Tyger Dhula.

At A/Visions, we had a flawless victory from Martin Messier’s “water drops plus strobe lights” piece. It turns out you can strobe it just right and make it look like the drops of water are moving up. (Honors out also to Myriam Bleau’s Second Self, with very strong LED lines and masks, but I did not sneak any pix from that)

Kode9 closing down the outdoor stage on Saturday with excellent, heavy footwerk and post-bass etc etc.

I was not expecting to dig Factory Floor, but I ended up really enjoying the pulse of two drummers, even when they slid a bit due to monitoring issues.

Lamine Fofana was much more dub and crackle and space than I was expecting, but I really enjoyed it — it felt like he had a real handle on the soundsystem.

Kara-Lis Coverdale was a dash uneven, and started with maybe a bit more noodling than I had in mind — but the last two-thirds came together really well.

But, let’s close with Mateo Murphey, Montréal techno veteran, and his dub/tech/trance live show in the Sphere, with visuals that started like this:

… and rapidly turned into this:

This was not … technically hard, and the Sphere gave a huge advantage — but I think this show had the most gasps of delight of anything at Mutek, which is not so bad.

dreamworld

Montréal in summer, a real fantasy land:

join the slam dance

Some quick words about Anz’s two hours closing Mr. Sunday and Avalon Emerson’s three, and Akanbi’s deep afro morning set:

  • Anz and Florida breaks, huh — a lot of Miami in her current sound, but also the Fixate record, as well as Clearly Rushing and a whole quasi-dancehall section.
  • Avalon Emerson started in “John Digweed vs Nick Warren 2001” territory, and I was deeeelighted — though I think the correct comparison for her for the prog veterans is clearly Sasha.
  • Akanbi, on the mic! A really nice run through afrobeats, dancehall, r&b, and the patience to let a a pop track play out at a much lower volume — and keep the dancefloor there through force of personality.

There’s also been this … thing happening, which is interesting: people are dancing. Like, really going for it dancing. There was a moment near the end of Theo Parrish where we had about six people doing fairly formal house dancing, moving in and out of each other’s spaces, and very much not just standing and facing the DJ and doing the standard two-step shuffle. This has also happened at Anz, especially later in the evening when there was a bit more space, and earlier on at Avalon Emerson (I saw a woman doing a half-time candy skip!) — it’s not quite 1976, but it is something. I am, of course, mostly at Nowadays all the time, but I am interested to see if this is happening elsewhere (or at Elsewhere, even).

theo parrish

We all made it through the six-hour morning set, somehow — lots of runs through the “Theo Parrish Loop” of soul / jazz / disco, house, ultradeep tech jams, repeat. This time we stopped on No UFOs, a Temptations record with a kickdrum snuck under it three times in succession, a gospel record cut against a vogue beat — to say nothing of the many unshazamable 12-minute epic tech records. I saw at least two people moved to tears at various points, someone brought a speaker cone to be signed, there were people who appear to have made their own merch for the show, etc

the vices, the vibes

A few thoughts for April, having made it past April Fool’s, the NYC miniquake, and making it right up to the eclipse.

I’ve been reading books about “focus”, of late, having mine damaged by some combination of age, the pandemic, getting covid, the internet, etc. Cal Newports’ smug-but-mostly-good text, Deep Work, talks about the power of being bored and letting one’s self be bored (this is also in Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, and many other places) — and I realized today, while at Nowadays, that “the club”, combined with Nowaday’s bans on phones, is why I tend to have so many good / bad ideas on the dancefloor.

(Today’s Bad Ideas was the music studio as array: four small production studios that have magical moving soundproof walls that can be opened to have a four-point surround setup in a bigger room.)

Further along these lines, this Ted Gioia piece really left me shook, in terms of how fractured I see my own focus — and this response from L.M Sacasas was perhaps even better. As a secret fan of Blaise Pascal, I’m always glad to see him pop up. Sacasas’ mention of acedia, usually translated into English as “sloth”, struck especially hard: “But it may also look like incessant busyness, so long as we are busy at everything but what we really ought to be doing”.

I also made it through Susan Rogers’ book, This Is What It Sounds Like, which is a good read — but starts off discussing “authenticity” in music with a very striking turn of phrase: “Authenticity is the _subejctive_ conviction that the emotion expressed in a musical performance is genuine and uncontrived” — italics mine.

This is sort of amazing, because throughout the rest of the book, Rogers sneaks away from the subjectiveness part, e.g. “To be clear, _Bach’s music is no less authentic than The Shagg’s_” — italics from Rogers. I certainly don’t often think of authenticity (my 2017 least favorite word of the year) as being in the eye of the beholder — probably because it makes talking about music with others very difficult, if you can’t agree on where the band is starting from — but I will have to do so more in the future.

we spring

new cultural spaces for music

^^ that turn of phrase leaped into my mind when walking around Seattle. I went past Sonic Boom, and was struck by a possibly false turn of nostalgia, that I had heard 107.7 The End talking about “tickets at Sonic Boom, <other record store>, etc”. I had also gone by a million bookshops, which, correctly, also double as event spaces … and also by the wonderfully named and totally gigantic Mox Boarding House, a gaming store, which of course runs a ton of events. (We’ll leave the Wargaming Speakeasy for another post).

“Record Stores” are a known space for music. “Boarding House” is a goofy name for gaming. Does the phrase “Techno Boarding House” have meaning? Probably not. What about “Dance Speakeasy”? Or “Listening Motel”?

The game, then, is simple: Take one thing from List A, and one thing from List B, and see if you have something – order is variable, articles and prepositions are optional, maybe add an adjective for kicks.

List A:

Record, Book, Music, Instrument, Electronics, Synth, Gear, Synthesizer, Concert, Dance, Art, Choir, Fashion, Rent, Vinyl, Listening, Meditation, Night, Cassette, CD, MP3, Band, Community, [List of all Music Genres, but here are some to start], Jazz, House, Ambient, Techno, Grime, Hip-Hop.

List B:

Store, Cafe, Club, Social Club, Nightclub, Night, Hall, Dancehall, Bar, Gallery, Center, Centre, Conservatory, University, College, Institute, Party, Concert, Room, Show, House, Studio, Atelier, Venue, Function, Exchange, Community, Collective, Co-Op, Restaurant, [List of all Food Venues, e.g. “Bistro”], Theatre, Gallery, Performance, Zine, Magazine, Label (oho), Space, Clinic, Hospital, Archive, Library, Forum, Gymnasium, Lyceum, School, Speakeasy, Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn, Boarding House, Church, Cathedral, Mosque, Ashram, Madrasa, Temple, Tabernacle, Yard Sale, Garage Sale, Rummage Sale, Livestream, Multipurpose Room.

Here are some examples from real life: Bar au Vinyle, Ambient Church, De School, The Music Institute. Here are some silly examples: Community Community, Dancehall Dancehall, The Choir Hospital (ouch!), Lyceum of Cassettes.

But, here are some fun examples: The House Music Rummage Sale, MP3s de Party, Heavy Jazz Madrasa, The Grand Listening Motel. How do those spaces work? Are they actually new? I can imagine each of them, which suggests that they are not — but perhaps there’s enough to grow on.

western wind

louisiana, louisiana

winter city