| (mutek) |
THE MUTATED DIARY OF TOBIAS
29th. 11.00 pm. Arrive at
Dorval. Pukey mid-‘70s architecture greets me. I take a cab to the McGill dorms
downtown. The cab driver thinks he is Jacques Villeneuve. Montreal
flashes by in the night. I arrive, smoke even though I don’t smoke,
prepare for the arrival of Discorder agents Paul and Tanya, and
tomorrow’s festivities. I am in a Presbyterian dorm and I feel like a
heretic spy.
30th. Anarchist graffiti
abounds around McGill: posters, slogans. I prepare for the first Happy
Hour. This is a big deal: no Gore-Tex here. Everyone is slick. People
wear a scarf to take a shit. Vancouver’s Ben Nevile has snagged
a live slot as Ricardo Villalobos and Dandy Jack are held
up at the border. He astounds everyone with his inventive and LIVE
laptop set, performing with software he wrote himself and a programmed
air-MIDI joystick. Finally the Chilean-Germans take over, rocking the
place with a live set of crisp minimal techno that is only a taste of
their later marathon sets. Villalobos looks and rocks like a superstar.
Onto Ex-Centris. Everyone sits down on the floor in the seat-less
theatre. Martin Tetreault + I8U output bass and crackles,
and Goem quickly assault all with a wall of sound that forces me
to move away from the speakers. Mikael Stavostrand is dubby +
clicky but unremarkable. Montreal’s Jetone finishes the evening
with a journey through classical ambient and sliced and diced beats in
another on-the-fly live laptop set. Already this year I can see the
immense leap several people have made from using the laptop as a
glorified DAT to playing the laptop as a live instrument.
31st. Ben Nevile and I head out for dejeuner at La
Place Milton. Ben says he needs to eat 30% more because he is bigger.
Later, having coffee, a red-headed girl with braces approaches me for a
djarum. I give her the last one—I am not much of a smoker. Social
smoking? People walk around here with cigs hanging out of their mouths
24/7. And everyone drinks everywhere. You could get a liquor license for
a garbage can. Why can't BC be like this? Why are we such FUCKING
PURITANS? The 5-7 features local Montreal artists. An interesting lot,
but rather undeveloped in their sound. Julien Roy is good with
his laptop beats, Vrac attacks with a noise set, and Rodeo
in Reno get droned & stoned over a heavy analogue set-up. The
Ex-Centris show delivers. Montreal’s AELab smoothes out into
ambience and beats, but it is California’s Matmos that steal
the night with an incredible live show, playing a rat cage with a violin
bow and sampling a liposuction tube for “California Rhinoplasty.”
The German group Rechenzentraum up the tempo with a fantastic
off-kilter & dark techno set and well-mixed off the cuff visuals
that propel everyone dancing, or at least bobbing their heads in an
avante-garde fashion. Back at the SAT, we catch Mike Shannon cutting perfectly smooth on 3 decks,
and then Villalobos and Dandy Jack drop a Playhouse
sounding live set of hard, minimal house. After about an hour and a
half, Villalobos takes over on the decks. Not only is he a stellar
producer, he can DJ like a mindfucker! Smooth and hard, mixing in ‘80s
classics like Thomas Dolby, Nitzer Ebb, & Technotronic.
We dance until 3am, then head back to the dorms, dead tired.
01st.
Burnout. We are wandering, eyes wide, feet barely supporting bodies. Outside
the SAT, the nightlife of St. Catherine’s takes over—5x the intensity of Robson
Street. I hear the music and the French language all mixed together in a wet
ensemble. Earlier at the 5-7, Kapotte Muziek (the alter-ego of Goem)
presented a live found-sound contact-mic performance by a workshop of festival
goers. That brings us to now, and to Process, whose mindbending visuals
and intricate minimal ambient music compliment the repetitive, Terry Riley-esque
set by Phillipe Cam (France). Gustavo Lamas (Argentina) moves
into beats n’ washes, and Germany’s DJ Triple R plays a straightforward,
muted set of dub techno. But the real surprise was Montreal’s Akufen, who
simply rocked the place with hard, cutting beats and well-thought out
programming, slamming into deep minimal techno. We walk back in drenching rain,
soaking ourselves to the skin.
02nd. I
awake feverish and sick. The festival is taking its toll and Montreal continues
to rain upon us when we least expect it. Barely conscious at the 5-7,
Montreal’s Mitchell Akiyama and Toronto’s Tomas Jirku play two
solid minimal techno sets for their Substractif label launch. At the
main event, Dettinger, whose 20 minute set means I only catch the last
few textured minutes of beautiful soundscape. The rest of the night was
forgettable. Germany’s Kompakt label crew of Jonas Bering and Closer Music leave a lot to be
desired. Closer play whole tracks at 110bpm, very basic crisp minimal house,
and people start to leave. DJ Tobias Thomas is plain boring: play the
whole track, mix for 10 seconds, put the flanger on, repeat. Ben told me that
this is a German way of DJing, but if this is the case, then why not just buy a
jukebox and get the same effect? It would be a hell of a lot cheaper. We leave
early, psyched for tomorrow.
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