Mutek as a newbie

Montreal:

Amazing city with not but two sets of world spectacle residuals - the '76 Olympics and the Expo 67 - for me to visit and photograph in my catalog of distopian modernist architecture. Went to the biosphere and biodome, where little French-Canadian children kept running around shrieking 'le penguin!!!!!' which is actually adorable, as are most things shrieked in what would otherwise be totally out-of-context (how often can you shout 'the penguin' and be referencing something in the room?) that starts with Le.

Mutek:

Ahh, the small festival, seeing the same freaks for days on end, the sense of focused thought. As pointed out in car-full-of-music-journos (which was odd when doing the border crossing 'what do you all do for a living?' ummm...write about music? i thought they'd shut us out for sure (we know what you think about Celine Dion - banished!) it was a split between head and heart, or should i say, the basement experiments and the rest of the house.

Was psyched to see Diane Labrosse not just because she was one of two women on stage for THE WHOLE FESTIVAL but because her low-menace super sharp premordial mix of tones (electronic music suited to the movements of t.rex back when his claims of world dominance were unchallenged) stood out from first two days of rumble-and-click boys for its sense of balance across the whole event, just just lamely building up like it's the damn golden section then retreating.

Loved the first half of Apparat's set, all these huge sheets of warm synths over shuttled beats, just epic and hard but enveloping, too much, too much - it settled down to bugged out darkness and more straightforward beats and just went on. Other people liked the second half better, ehh.

Liked also Mathew Jonson's set at Metropolis, which became the best part of the night since Ricardo Villalobos "missed his flight" (apparently the third time this has happened to Mutek events, curious). Funny but sort of restrained take on his monster-y hooks and wiggy pads - had the whole crowd bouncing before Adam Heart came on with Luciano to do this weird Funk carioca-sounding beat for 10 minutes before dropping some rapped vocals I didn't recognize but will for the rest of my life after having them drilled into my head for the rest of the set. One carpooler actually fell asleep during the set, dear readers. Yikes.

All this said, I am really only beginning to understand the microdistinctions of techno and house in such a way as to hear the movements along a laptop set in terms of genre instead of the dread non-intellect of aural response, i.e. I'm new to inside listening and often felt completely out of the conversation because I couldn't frame my thoughts in genre-terms. Yes, it takes me a little to write this on my blog since admitting ignorance is not something music journalists or bloggers like to do, but it's true. I am new to these genres, and went to Mutek to get excited and figure out where I should go next after loving Ellen Allien, Villalobos, and the new Juan Maclean but not digging the new Michael Mayer and thinking, 'this should clear the air for me.' It did, but not by chat, by listening. Great yet odd for me.

One conversation I had with a dance music aesthete led me to the disturbing thought that people still can't get past the frustration with 'the tyranny of the beat,' the structure by which the body ingests sound and makes sense of it. The beat is not rythmn, but they are intimately related, and rhythm has alternately been chastized or celebrated in nearly every progressive music music movement of the century, but ultimately, physiologically, is it not what connects sound to body?

A few weeks ago at Webster Hall I bumped into three girls in the bathroom. They were coming in from downstairs at the club and ran right into me - I really annoyed at them and kept my eye on them because they were laughing hysterically but not making any sound - laughing sooo hard at running into me? No, they were deaf, and laughing at something else. And out dancing at a huge club. This tells me something about what the beat does to the body that is powerful and important.

And this is where the story begins and ends for now...