I just came back from Montreal after a 10 day visit that involved meeting friends, hanging around the city, playing a DJ gig and attending MUTEK festival. It was a very inspiring and replenishing experience. Here are some highlights!

The Gig

The first thing in my mind when arriving was my DJ gig for the Moodswings party at Barbossa. This is an event run by CMD (alongside somebody3lse and Emil Paquin), who invited me previously to her radio show Modular Systems over at CKUT. I was very excited to be playing Montreal, and the night did not disappoint. The crowd was lively, open minded, and shared very fiery energy. I experimented playing lots of different genres, including a very hype reggaeton moment. The recording will be out soon through Moodswings! Very grateful for this opportunity to play one of my favorite cities.

The City

With the DJ gig completed, I could now relax and explore the city a bit before the festival. I am no stranger to Montreal as I've visited before, so this time I spent time exploring the neighborhoods I was staying at, a lot of the times with friends! The thing I love about this city is how culturally diverse it is, given its people from many different countries and its bilingualism. Thanks to the french and diverse migrant influence, I am happy to report the food is top tier as well.

The weather was a bit chaotic, with around half of the days of my stay having really heavy thunderstorms. The first one caught me off guard and I ended up soaked, so I learned my lesson and managed to avoid the future ones by checking the forecast. But there were also plenty of sunny days, so I could spend some time in some of the many beautiful public parks of the city.

Forum

MUTEK festival also hosts a conference named Forum, which I decided to give a try. It is a mix of panels, workshops and networking events for artists and professionals in creative and media industries. Honestly, the networking aspect was not for me. Between getting socially drained quickly and the corporate focus I wasn't finding much value in engaging here. Coming from a dance music and DIY background which basically has an opposite ethos to this, I value more connecting with people through shared experience and collaboration.

On the flipside, the workshops were very valuable. The highlight was the third day which focused on soundsystems, which are all about shaping collective spaces through sound. Many of the panelists shared lived experience, generational knowledge around this culture, technical details on how to build your own, and more. There was also a track review session and panel with Wawa, Zora Jones, and Nazar where attendees (and also them!) shared WIPs, which sounded crisp in the soundsystems installed in the room.

It would be nice if the FORUM took place earlier in the week. It was really challenging to wake up early for the conference while staying up late for the music. A lot of hard decisions had to be made and some days I was just super exhausted 😅

MUTEK Festival

Now onto some highlights of the festival!

• As soon as I left the Forum and went to the outdoor stage of the festival, the drip dramatically increased.
• The outdoor stage at Esplanade Tranquile is another highlight because it's free! It's nice to have passer bys and festival people alike hanging around to get the energy going for the rest of the night.

• Kali Malone performed her usual drone magic at la Maison Symphonique, which had a huge and powerful organ on site.
• This is the time where I've been surrounded by the most friends in a music festival. With many of my Vancouver friends who attended Active Passive, people who happened to be in the city this week, and getting to know some internet friends IRL, the vibes were immaculate.
• Anti-highlight: a new kind of annoying guy at the function just dropped. For a couple of shows, there was this guy at the front row having a conversation with ChatGPT for the entirety of the performance using voice to text. While being blasted by amazing music. I couldn't believe it.
• The lunar eclipse happened on Thursday night, which I'm pretty sure channeled some powerful energy for the rest of the festival. Things really picked up in strangeness and force in the coming days.
• On Saturday, I went on a little sidequest to attend a day party at parquette. It is a really unique venue that found an opportunity to settle temporarily in a soon to be demolished building, allowing for a more affordable setup. The venue usually hosts day long parties, allowing people to come in and out depending on their plans. At the time we arrived, reggae music was playing, parents were playing with their kids, and people were chatting and having coffee (oh yes, they have a delicious coffee bar besides the usual alcoholic bar. More dance music spaces with coffee please!). By the time we left, the energy had picked up on the dancefloor as the place got more crowded. I also appreciated the spacious chill out section in the upper floor, and the ceviche and raspados being sold in the patio.
• Another workshop I attended was a live A/V class with Noemi Bucci, who showed us her Ableton session built over years to enable her to improvise and take risks while performing. Watching her play after seeing the behind the scenes was awesome!

• A Guy Called Gerald, one of the pioneers of jungle, played two different live sets. The first one at the indoor venue was an unrelenting barrage of breakbeats and jungle, in the best possible way. The second one was at the outdoor stage, where he navigated through house and techno masterfully, giving us that last bit of energy we needed to reach the finish line.

Nocturne 4

The final two highlights require their own section, as they were the most inspiring and incredible experiences for me. Nocturne 4, the nighttime programming for Saturday, was absolutely perfect from beginning to end. The curation was very well done, with each act laying the groundwork for the next one. It was also a treat for me as the focus of the programming was on dark latin american sounds, noise, metal, industrial and hardcore. I found it pretty bold for a festival that focuses on high-tech and pristine sounds.

The other factor in play was that the first two performances were going to be those of friends: Jorge (con secuencias) and Max (El Ángel Exterminador). Both of them were part of a cohort of a MUTEK mentorship program that brought the artists to the next level to be able to perform the festival the year after (shoutout to the other cohort members whose performances I saw, all of them were amazing!). With many friends in common, the floor at their respective stages were packed with lovely people channeling their support, which kicked off the energy of the night beautifully.

con secuencias played a moody and introspective set that took elements of tribal prehispánico and amplified them with dizzying sound design. Playing at the SAT dome stage with visuals from Milo Reinhardt, it really felt like we were inside a huge mesoamerican pyramid. Then came El Ángel Exterminador (with visuals by Anastasiia Vorobiova), who put us under a spell with entrancing spoken word passages, netherworld bass frequencies and spectral dembow beats. These sets excelled in engulfing us into the veil of darkness thanks to their ornate sonic worldbuilding.

Afterwards came Evicshen, queen of noise. With her custom electronic devices, she performed a proper noise set, getting on top of her gear desk, walking among the crowd, and even cracking a whip that made the audience duck in admiration and fear of getting struck. She really told us: there are no rules, anything goes. After, came Violent Magic Orchestra, who blend gabber, rave and black metal into an euphoric blend that works so well even though it feels like it shouldn't. Thanks to the accumulated darkness and roughness from the previous sets, they managed to transmute all of it into peak energy. Their engagement with the crowd was also amazing, riling us up into a mosh pit and stage diving to join in the fun with us. I looked around and all of us had a big dumb smile on our face.

Finally, Cry (duo by Kilbourne and Relaxer) took this exhilaration and kept it going with a proper live hardware set at the intersection of hardcore punk and techno. The driving beats accompanied by their harsh vocals were a great send off into a night of further dancing. It was also great to see they had all of their setup at the ground level, sharing the pit with the rest of us. I then went to check out Ben UFO at Metropolis, but his set was really non-chalant so it couldn't really match the peak vibes I experienced before.

Nonchalant is I word I keep coming back to. This night was very refreshing because it was the exact opposite of this (let's call it chalant). Artists were not on a pedestal and they reminded us that we are all humans sharing space and having fun. I'm really tired of going to events and having people acting cool and smug. We are forgetting how to let go and have fun, putting first some made up online persona and clout chasing. And in a time of escalating oppression, I think it is straight up self sabotage. We can share great times and build nice things together, the first step is to look around and recognize we are all in this together. Cheers to all of the chalants out there.

Nazar

My other big highlight was seeing Nazar perform. He is one of my favorite artists in electronic music today, taking angolan Kuduro and roughing it up with brutal chops, distortion and wildly alive synthesizers. At the Forum, I got to see him share a demo for an upcoming track and answer some questions about his art practice. It struck me that he is a very laid back and approachable person. I also live for his social media stories, which are often funny and very positive, focusing on the perks of getting good sleep, working out, trying out tactical gear to weather out the elements, and other stuff that I jive with.

He was set to perform on Sunday, and since his last album was more vulnerable and intimate, I imagined the performance would be a good comedown for the festival. Boy was I wrong. He absolutely obliterated us with unrelenting bass, a fierce stage presence, chill inducing vocals, and his signature rough kuduro sound that is unlike anything else out there. The light show was intense and brought us into a trance of non-stop wild dancing. There were some moments of respite (kind of), but they still were sonically bewildering and just served as way to unleash mayhem once again. He explained this chaotic energy himself:

It was a true trance-inducing ritual that awakened something primal, with the low end frequencies stimulating every cell in our bodies. His music deals with themes of war, colonialism and grief from the angolan civil war, portuguese colonization and the modern day manifestation of these evils. I really admire how the music is so fierce and cutting-edge, while at the same time he is a very laid back and down to earth person. I think this is what harsh music does for me, it lets me transmute all these negative emotions into something life affirming. Thanks Nazar, I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.