MUTEK Day 3: Here comes the sun.
June 9
Fridays at MUTEK are always the point at which people get their dancing shoes on, with the more intellectual, abstract stuff giving way - thankfully! - to more clubby fare.
Warming things up in the afternoon was the third Experience event in the park by MUTEK HQ, featuring yours truly (as Hissy Fit) opening for Toronto's most excellent Knowing Looks (below) and fellow adopted Montrealler Bowly. The weather played nice and by the end of the event at 7pm the park was full to overflowing. Bonus points to MUTEK "act" FoodLab, who served up intensely arty snacks to the thick-rimmed-plastic-glasses-crowd right behind the dj booth.
Note to producer types: when playing outdoors using an Akai controller, bear in mind those lovely colour-coded buttons all look the same in bright sunlight. Both Bowly and Knowing looks had to hook up awkward improvised parasols to block the light on theirs. Almost made me glad to have taken my soul-crushingly heavy 2003-vintage Yamaha 01x along. Almost.
After this it was over to the Windows Lounge - blatantly conceived to fool people into thinking that electronic music producers use Windows - where Pezzner was playing for free. Melodic tech house just doesn't get any better than Pezzer in this humble writer's opinion, and this set was no exception.
Then it was time to refuel on some delicious curry poutine - French Canada's tasty cheese-gravy-chips delicacy - before heading off to see the orgy of 808 sounds that was Richie Hawtin A.K.A. Plastikman's set at Nocturne 03. Obviously a huge night in terms of attendance and crowd enthusiasm, it was perhaps more interesting than it was good, with the light show - apparently controlled by Hawtin himself - well below the standard set by the MUTEK video staffers working the other shows. Musically it was huge, super-bassy techno, self-indulgent at times. When he played Spastik-era material, though, things got pretty intense.
Over in the smaller Savoy room it was time for some Canadian bass music heavies to do their thing, with locals Skinnybones (awesomely weird percussive funky, below) and Komodo (deep dubstep) opening up for Toronto's XI, who played his trademark all-over-the-map bass music stylings. Note to everybody fucking up XI's name: it's xi, as in the Roman numeral for 11, not XL or X1. Just sayin'....
Next up: MUTEK gets "oot and aboot" at Piknik Electronik.
Posted by bassmusic
