After missing last year's edition, I was back in La Belle Province this last month for the seventh edition of Mutek. (Ya, I know, latearse roundup) Unlike previous years where the motherload of concerts were held at the SAT or the Musée Juste Pour Rire, events this year were based at a “new” industrial space, renovated from an old metallurgical foundry called the Fonderie Darling. It was a huge expanse with massively high ceilings and your typical, nicely done, exposed brick walls and ceiling pipes. The acoustics were reasonably good, provided you had a central position on the floor, but due to the layout of the speakers things could get a bit muddy and boomy in the back or the irregular crannies around the bar.

Arriving on a Friday afternoon from San Francisco, I picked up my weekend “passeport” for all the weekend's shows, including afternoon outdoor picnics at the Parc Jean Drapeau.

Highlights:

Over the course of the three days, I made some exciting musical discoveries, enjoying the music of artists that were previously not on my “radar”. For starters, during the Friday Nocturnal Alex Under and Guido Schneider set the tone of the night with two subtly melodic yet jacking and deeply musical sets. Both artists, I believe were making their North American debuts and really made a nice splish-splash!!! Yeah! Afterwards Perlon label head, Dimbiman, a quasi-regular at Mutek events, closed out the night with an amazing session of straightup techno, playfully mixing in the offhand melodic gesture and perpetually shape shifing micro-rhythms over the solidly anchored four-four base. Psychedelically delicious!

Thanks to some summer showers, the Saturday Piknic Electronik was moved inside, to the Fonderie, and we were privvy to some more captivating livesets. The most notable was the closing set by Chilean and Swiss team, Dandy Jack (laptop+controller+synths) and Sonja (DJ). Aside from being one energetic mofo, Mr. Jack works the room and musical pressure points like no other. His livesets are chock full of real actual musical progressions. In mixing in a new song live, he'll uncover bit and pieces of the new theme, from different angles, teasing the audience but holding back on fully satisfying the built up tension. Then when he finally does bring the “cadence”, it feels so unbelievably good that the crowd usually can't stop itself from going absolutely apeshite!

The evening Nocturnal at the Metropolis later that night was a mixed bag. Though Mossa and parts of Thomas Brinkmann's sets represented well, for me it was Lawrence who really stole the show. Kicking off the soirée with some astonishingly deep dubtek, he proceeded to tear the house down with a jaw-dropping amalgam of Luomos's sexy microhaus (think rotund basslines and micro-touches sans the disco flair) blended with older skool Platiskman's long temporal tragectories and technoid deliberate-ness! Brilliant!

Now the Detroit Grand Pubahs' appearance was definitely an attempt to break with convention or shake things up a little bit, and like with Donna Summer's mixed performance from a couple years ago. Montréal audiences aren't really into the super aggressive, in-your-face, fuckity-fuck, trench-coat-and-G-string tempo, performance-wise. Admittedly, they were having loads of fun but aside from their grooving backing music, a delish brew of jacking detroit techno + maimi booty bass, there wasn't much for most folks to latch onto.

After Pubah's rocked out, the french duo, Nôze, armed with analog synths, controllers and laptops, proceeded to dish out a delicious, insanely musical set. Like Dandy Jack earlier, they really were able to deftly use their instruments, especially the arpegiators and pitch shifting functions to cookup some really tight transitional sequences. Again a tasty surprise and happy musical discovery!

Domingo, after tasty breakfast with Ko and some quality time with the good folks over at InBeat Records! I headed over to the Piknic Electronik. Richie Hawtin and Ricardo Villalobos were dropping bass science from behind the decks in a tent underneath the Man, a magnificent metalloid “stabile” by Alexander Calder, the whole affair overlooking the city of Montréal. The piknic has really grown over the last couple of years from a loose collection Mutek-y friends/DJs to a weekly rendezvous for thousands of music lovers of all styles and ages, from friends and families to T-dance folks cooling out and tweaked out ravers that've been up for days.

The festival Finale, later on that Sunday evening, was a ~scape label showcase featuring livesets by Jan Jalinek and Pole and his band (a drummer and guitarista).

For the finale of the Finale, Deadbeat rocked the floor with probably one of the best and most varies livesets that I've ever seen from him, cooking up tastily large sound design, stir-frying it inna big reverberant dubspace, intermingling layers of lush textures and blending elements from a wide range of influences. Among those was a hard banging-techno interlude that really didn't do the overall set justice. Thankfully he managed to bring it around incorporating rhythmic excursions of the type found in reggaeton, other dancehall flavours, at times playing around with the half-not pulse (like in dubstep). To get an idea of the sounds that I'm talking about, many of these directions can be found midway through his liveset @ Yellow in Japan, posted recently on his website.

Afterwards it was off to the “official” afterparty, which was held at the Academy (de danse) on St. Laurent. This second story dance studio was the perfect location, welcoming, cozy and intimate. The Circus Company label head, at the helm behind the decks, played some of the most simply remarkable, awesomely deep, instrumental, garage-y house I've heard in recent memory! Though it was excruciating to leave in the middle of a brilliant track, I finally managed to pull myself away, to head back to the hotel sometime after 5am, thoroughly thrilled by the weekend but dead-tired!

Misc:

• Images by the official Mutek photographer and amigo, Miguel LeGault.
  
• Photos are up at defchild flickr and elsewhere on flickr
  
• Festival panel podcasts: Is Vinyl Dead, Where to go, Future Music.