So here's my Mutek roundup. In general, I felt that the festival's programming was much weaker than in previous years. As I've attended every show for the last 3 festivals, and hope to play out here, I'm pretty sensitive to the aesthetics of the lineup.

My time was spent hopping between the electro-acoustic tinged sitdown concerts at Ex-centris and the more techno-oriented nightlife-y bits at the SAT and Metropolis.

Of the Ex-centris shows, I thoroughly enjoyed Nomig: pdx_01, a very evocative and abstract short film with an imposing score and tight associations between the visual and sonic gestures. At the end of this June 3 lineup, Pure/Dekam came on and gave a very powerful and political show that was a blend of the politics of Move On and the visual aesthetics of a silent documentary. One of the more powerful aspects of this show was that the visuals and sounds were interesting on their own and only about halfway through the hour long show did I start to make the political and social associations, at which point the work took on a whole new light. Amazing stuff.

Moving on to the shows at the SAT, the June 2 Nocturnal was a rather uneventful. I arrived shortly before an unenthusiastic Vitaminsforyou finished his set, the Junior Boys then came on and with a dubbed out guitar, keyboard and some processed lead vocals, laid down a very fresh and musically engaging set.

Now after these guys were done and the crowd sufficiently warmed up, Schneider TM and Smith N Hack laid down sets, that while they were nominally interesting (even visually), did NOT jive with the Junior Boys and the party-a-bility of the context or pace they'd set. Very frustrating.

A similar thing happened on Friday June 4 at the SAT for Experience 2. Millimetrik kicked of the evening with a decent but not particularly stimulating drone-fest. This basically put everyone on the floor in the cross-legged position.

Now when Frivolous came on and *gasp* spoke to the crowd, saying “I'm the Frivolous, and I'm gonna cook up a little something for you”, he then proceeded to tear down the house with everything disco house inflected beats to odd-ball cut-up vocal snippet. Halfway through his show, the Frivolous puts on a chef's shirt, and then 10 minutes later, a chef's hat, gives it a spin and precedes to take the dance floor to the next level.

That was all good, except that the dance floor was still suffering from a sitting-down lethargy induced by Millimetrik, so by the time the Frivolous was done cooking up a lil' sump'n sump'n and everyone was dancing his time was up. Next guys up, Dumais, Mossa, Shannon and Hunsberger, while they kept the dance floor going, were nowhere as creative and especially not as fun as the Frivolous.

From the non Metropolis shows, the only other standout for me was Byetone, co-founder of the Raster Noton label. He performed at the Thursday, June 3 Nocturne in a truly unspectacular field of overly jaunty and generally un-dance-able experimental techno fuckery. His techno was very structured and always went somewhere. aka developed!!! That might seem obvious, but to a lot of these chumps, development of a musical idea is like kryponite.

Next, Byetone has these amazingly engaging visuals, monochromatic rectangles and squares, interleaving and moving about generally in a very ordered way. If you watched carefully you could see the edge of one rectangle moving horizontally hitting the edge of another moving vertically and the point of coincidence, a point that was musically interesting ...not even, just rhythmic. That was nice to see that because on a first glimpse, the shapes had a quasi-random feel in their trajectories. Bref, Byetone ... yeah baby!!

Now on to the shows from the Metropolis Friday and Saturday Night, since I'm getting tired of writing about all the stuff I wasn't feeling, and not 'cos I didn't try either.

Notables:

Fax - great, melodic dubbed out atmospheres with a nice riddim section, reminded me of the warmth, and thoughtfully musical goodness of Murcof.

Isolée - gloriously epic basslines, thick textures and very thumpy and dance-able riddims. A night saver.

Krikor - although plagued by technical difficulties, once this frenchman got going, things were tight. Great sense of composition and development of already funky musical structures.

Crackhaus - fun but unmusical, they were obviously having fun and the crowd was feeding off of that. I didn't partake though.

Herbert - DJ set, didn't give me anything to grab onto and by this time in the Nuit Blanche I was fading.

Plastikman - plagued as well with visual technical difficulties, brought on in part by his insistence on doing EVERYTHING himself, sounds, visuals, lights ... you name it! Delegate my boy! Delegate!! The house was overpacked and although it took me about 40 minutes to get into the 2+ hour set, once I did, I was feeling it. You can always be assured that Mr. Hawtin is going somewhere with an idea, even if it takes 10 minutes ...and for me it was always totally worth it. I think overall, his set wasn't as good as at last year's Mutek, but visuals were more compelling. Overall, I had a good time, so I'm not complaining.

Sunday morning, after my disappointment with the Saturday night line up and the Herbert set, I basically called it a festival. One of my favourite producers Jeff Samuel was playing at the Piknic Électronik, but I decided to hang around the homeshed and work on my own music instead. And for the Finale ...*yawn* ...I blew that off as well, all the talk talk about Jamie Lidell and what not, don't get me started on one of the worst shows I've ever seen, Super_Collider at Usine C, Mr. Lidell was partially responsible and after all the dross I'd taken in to date, didn't need a repeat.