MUTEK Days 4 & 5: The grand finale.
June 11
If MUTEK is Montreal's Berlin, then surely Piknic Electronik is our Ibiza, and during MUTEK the normally Sunday-only outdoor event covers Saturday as well. Home to thousands dancing in the mid-afternoon sun under Alexandre Calder's 21 metre-high statue "Lhomme" (Man), it's a frequent point of pride for local clubbers.
Upon our arrival at the Saturday edition, Floating Points was finishing up his main stage set with the kind of solid funky stuff you would expect. We carried on to the Guru Stage - Guru being Montreal's contribution to the energy drink arms race - where local melodic techno was the order of the day, with Footprints, Recife and Simon Called Peter playing top-notch live sets with not a computer in sight. Back at the main stage,Terry Lee Brown followed Floating Points, and played a solid set of deeper house and techno, sadly plagued by technical problems which killed the vibe for many, though obviously not for these kids:
Later that night Nocturne 4 at the Metropolis was surprisingly rich in bands, making a welcome exception to the bald-dude-with-laptop general rule. Four Tet associates Rocketnumbernine played a highly danceable set before Kieran himself took over for an hour of solidly eclectic laptop fare, spanning pretty much every style and tempo one could ask for. The night's second band, Elektro Guzzi, was a discovery for many, a guitar-bass-drums trio from Austria that coaxed some impressively big-room-techno-sounding noises out of their instruments.
Giving a solid 3 hours of tech-trance to end the night in the main room was a live set by James Holden. Arpeggiators, arpeggiators everywhere! It's surprising how little his sound has changed, while still remaining interesting, from this classic, albeit long, 2002 remix:
Sunday's Piknic hotspot was the Guru Stage, tucked away far from the main stage and easy to miss. Sutekh, who is generally excellent at the techno stuff and was so again here, warmed things up for a dj set by James Holden, who gave us almost the polar opposite of the previous night's performance, playing super-slow house right up until the last few songs and getting trancy in parts. There's something slightly ridiculous about very slow trance but it was nonetheless lots of fun.
Looking at the festival on the whole, most people seemed to be talking about the Amon Tobin set - still this writer's high point - as well as Elektro Guzzi as fan favourites. There were, as always, complaints that the passes come to about the same amount as seeing all the paid shows, which virtually nobody does, making it a less than stellar value. On a musical and visual level, however, there was something for pretty much everybody, making it as fun a 5 days as it's ever been. Roll on 2012.
Posted by bassmusic
