Montreal, especially if you haven’t been before, and even more especially if you’re jetlagged to hell, has a way of messing with your preconceptions.
Everywhere you look there’s a strange melding of the North American (the way the streets look, the fondness for shouting, the dominance of processed cheese) and the continental European (the love of bicycles and cigarettes, the speaking French), with the addition of a borderline Scottish approach to drinking just to confuse matters further.
There are strip bars everywhere (tatty old-school ones, not glossy Spearmint Rhino chains), most particularly in the part of town where all the MUTEK events took place, and heavy metal and punk are by far the most visible subcultures, although there’s clearly a thriving hip hop culture as well – if the quite staggering quantity of high-quality graffiti in even the most inaccessible spots is anything to go by. It’s pretty cheerfully cosmopolitan, too: you’ll see groups of old Greek or Portuguese men sat outside their social clubs chatting away in French, the most famous food outlets are Jewish delis, and it took me a little while to get used to all the elderly Chinese people dressed in the North American OAP’s uniform of golfing slacks and pastel leisurewear.
I’m not trying to be exoticist here. None of this is “weird” or even worthy of comment in and of itself, it just is what it is. But for anyone more used to conventionally European or American cities, these unfamiliar juxtapositions have a way of making you ready to do a double-take at any point. And that’s probably quite a healthy way of being when you’re about to glut on electronic music for five days. It’s so easy to get blasĂ© at these internationalist art-rave beanfeasts that having the locality confound your expectations and put you in a mood to not take even small things for granted is definitely a good thing.
What was most wonderful about MUTEK was that some of the most abstract sets of the week actually created the best crowd buzz – even better than many of the more supposedly immediate dancefloor acts, in fact. Matmos, playing in the Monument National theatre on the first night, were a case in point. Playing to a rapt audience in the smart theatre venue, fifteen years into their career, the duo could have felt like they were settling into a position as electronic art establishment figures. But thankfully, no matter how academic their approaches or how broad their appeal might be, there is something so fantastically “other” about them – such a sense of the kind of intensely psychedelic peculiarity that just can’t be assimilated by any artworld discourse – that they can still create a dazzling collective experience completely on their own terms.
Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt – dressed as rocker and office drone respectively – were deadpan charm personified on stage, and the audience laughed frequently both at their terse between-song banter and at unexpected tweaks in their music. It wasn’t the dry laughter of hipsters showing they were in on the joke, either, but warm and real, a sharing of the pair’s enjoyment in tinkering with their tabletops full of jerry-rigged analogue synths and other devices, and a thrill at the often deeply weird but always instantly pleasurable melodies and textures that emerged. The rich, Terry Riley-inspired textures of their 2008 Supreme Balloon album dominated, but their signature crunchy, crackly beats constructed of samples from unusual objects were there throughout too.
When Daniel left Schmidt alone at the end to doodle out a delicate raga on his keyboard to twinkling drone backing the effect was absolutely gripping; a perfect encapsulation of the doctrine of “radical joy” which Matmos have spoken of in interviews, it was quirky without ever being self-undermining and ended to an uproarious reception which seemed to surprise and thrill the duo in turn as Daniel returned and they took their bows. This is how “art” music should be. The performance by [The User] that followed, a forcing of melodies from the buzz of a row of obsolete dot matrix printers plugged into equally archaic PCs as images flickered across their monitors, couldn’t possibly follow such a set in any successful way. It was clever, certainly, and there were poignant moments where the arthritic technology felt almost alive, gamely taking its one last shot at usefulness, but really it was a concept dragged out further than it warranted.
The following night’s events in the Monument National proved the ready engagement of the crowd with really weird sounds was not a fluke. A tidy combination of trippy electronic gurgles and kaleidoscopic animations of dancers’ bodies, skulls and flowers with a distinct whiff of the occult from Freida Abtan started off well. But the performance piece that followed by The Caretaker AKA James Leyland Kirby was something else. Looking every inch the 70s rockstar in gold lamĂ© shirt and shades, he subverted the usual tedium of laptop performances by downing the best part of a bottle of whisky as he manipulated his layers of samples from old sentimental records, all the while looking distractedly back at the huge projections of his own chaotic films behind him.
These films piled up footage from a drunken road trip across Europe, pretty girls’ faces, bar tables and moving views through windows recurring again and again and superimposed on themselves in a way that seemed random at first but which rapidly proved to be an amazing representation of the way memory itself works. It was hugely affecting, the music and images feeling like they were providing a glimpse into one person’s psyche every bit as revealing as a singer-songwriter’s lyrics could provide. Even when Kirby left his laptop and came out to sing an angrily vocodered version of Barbra Streisand’s ‘The Way We Were’, it felt personal and real and the audience again responded with huge warmth – seemingly to the surprise of this generally confrontational performer. Nurse With Wound‘s ambient performance and gripping surrealist films which followed were great and intense, particularly when they became increasingly discordant and Stephen Stapleton’s guitar began to emulate first Hendrix then Tony Iommi, but Kirby really dominated the evening.
The week’s club events began well over the road and past the grouchy hookers from the Monument National at the warehouse-like SocietĂ© des Arts Technologiques venue, where Kompakt’s Matias Aguayo and his ComĂ©me crew got loose with some house music which managed to be both intensely old-school in its construction and brilliantly fresh in its sound. Completely obliterating boundaries between DJing and a live set, they gave retro disco and Chicago house grooves a blast of Latin percussion and raw dub effects without ever going for the lowest common denominator. There was a bit of hipster stiffness in the crowd at first, but when Aguayo took the mic and started piling on the instantly recognisable vocal layers of his own tracks, they loosened up pretty quickly.
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your description of “Montreal” is that of the the 10 blocks north and south and 4 or 5 blocks east and west of the St Laurent strip there are plenty of parts of the city north, east, west and south of that small area you reviewed as the city of Montreal that are typical of any other north american city. As someone who grew up half his life in Montreal and has lived in many other cities in NA I can promise you what you described is unique to that small slice of the city of Montreal… next trip try to explore out side of the typical hipster/tourist footpaths and really explore the city you will find that its not a whole lot different then Toronto, Vancouver, New York or Chicago.