Five Days Of Avant-Garde Raving at MUTEK, Montreal’s Futuristic Electronic Music Festival

My friends are under the impression that I’ve flown up to Montreal to rave myself into French Canadian oblivion for five days straight before the summer’s over. Instead, I’m seated at the Théâtre Maisonneuve watching Ash Fure, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, give an almost athletic performance that involves manipulating sound with a sheet of plexiglass. I’m here for the 26th edition of MUTEK, the long-running festival that has its roots in underground electronic music and techno, but may be better described as a conference dedicated to pushing the possibilities of sound and vision to new extremes. Before the week is over, I’ll watch The White Lotus composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer demonstrate how he manipulates recordings of the human voice into his haunting scores, see techno forefather Kevin Saunderson perform alongside his son under his newly revived E-Dancer moniker, hear some truly astounding live house vocals, and, yes, even do a little something like a bit of raving.

“MUTEK is the coolest festival in the whole of North America,” says Yu Su, the producer and DJ. “There are these super experimental, very brave bookings. It’s very risk-taking and very culturally and genre diverse. It’s never about who’s hype. It’s basically the difference between Dries Van Noten and fast fashion.”

Yu first performed at the festival in 2018, shortly after she started making music, and now plays festivals and clubs around the globe. Her career exemplifies the festival’s ethos. Born in China, she was previously based in Vancouver, where she studied anthropology, a field she believes shares similarities with DJing. “The process is introverted, but the medium has to be a bit extroverted. You make music alone, you record alone, but then you have to go perform. As an anthropologist, you need to be able to spend hours in the library with archives, but you also need to go interview people.” Through her relationship with the festival, she’s done DJ sets, played with a band, and presented her music live, bathed in the light of an artist’s projected dreamscape. “MUTEK is actually part of how I grow,” she says. “It’s been a really nice run together.”

A key tenet of the festival’s history is providing support for DJs and producers who have never performed a traditional live set before.

“They actually kind of pushed me to do my first live set,” says the Montreal-based techno producer Priori. “I think that’s what happens for a lot of people. MUTEK is kind of like the instigator: ‘We want you to play live, we want you to collaborate.’ I think that pushes a lot of people outside their comfort zones.”

“In a weird way, it’s like an incubator for Canadian artists. I love that they’re really encouraging to emerging people, and I think they were also extra encouraging to me as a woman and a woman of color,” adds the Toronto-based artist and producer Ciel. “There aren’t that many of us in nightlife represented. Because there are a lot of women organizing this festival, they’ve really encouraged and fostered that.”

With venues dotted along Montreal’s Rue Sainte-Catherine, MUTEK’s live shows are able to engage electronic music performance in almost every conceivable way. A free-to-the-public open-air stage set up in the Esplanade Tranquille recalls a traditional summer festival setting. Stages at the Société des arts technologiques present experiences both under a planetarium-like dome and in a more traditional, small-scale live venue. Late-night shows at MTELUS provide a club-like atmosphere. Then there is the audio-visual experience presented at a performance art theater, where a touring version of Hamilton was playing that week on a nearby stage in the same complex. Highlights this year included Irish musician Max Cooper’s Lattice 3D/AV, a sonic and visual investigation into the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence, and Fure’s presentation of her project ANIMAL.

With a PhD from Harvard and roots in experimental opera, Fure is relatively new to performing among DJs and dance producers. “I had crawled out of the contemporary music world by making these very elaborate, multisensory performance-installation hybrids,” she says. A composer by training, she moved to Berlin in 2018. “I was really changed by my experience of club culture there. That pull away from concert music had already been happening in my practice, but it felt accelerated by what I experienced in the kind of somatic intensity and the relationship between architecture and amplification that I found in a lot of those incredible Berlin spaces.”

In ANIMAL, she manipulates sound provided by two coaxial speakers with a sheet of polycarbonate plastic, a process that allows her to focus and direct sound around the audience like a laser beam. The performance could almost be mistaken for a form of contemporary dance at first, but the show allows the audience to feel the sound in their bodies as well. Because the work depends on and interacts with the venue's architecture, the result is different every time.

While I eventually do find a few dance floor moments during the week, MUTEK is not your traditional techno festival. Artists and organizers are quick to point out that it is only possible to put on because of public funding and grants. While the festival has analogues in Europe and has spawned spin-offs, most notably in Mexico City, there is nothing quite like it in the United States. Though America is the birthplace of both house and techno, electronic music is still often seen as merely a soundtrack to partying and illicit behavior, and not something worthy of major public funding.

Watching Yu’s set during the first night, it occurs to me that many of these artists are approaching the basic idea of electronic music in the same way an abstract expressionist might approach a painting. A nightclub is the blank canvas, and lights, projections, and sound are the paint. While a painting then becomes an object that can be valued and sold on the market, live experimental music exists only in the moment and is impossible to commercialize.

“MUTEK is, to me, the more elegant side of electronic music. Sort of highbrow and a little academic, but still fun,” says Ciel. “There’s the really experimental stuff where you can kind of lose yourself and just sit quietly. But then there are also really high-octane sets presented really well.”