The ninth edition of the Montreal Mutek festival kicked off with a cocktail party for us media weasels at SAT. I think I missed a free handout of wine, but I managed to score some hors d’oeuvres. Win!

A/Visions 1

But of course the real kick-off was A/Visions 1 at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. A/Visions is a series of events pairing musicians with video artists. First up, Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, who fused delicate sound textures and thumping bass with visuals created in Ott’s own Superdraw software. Superdraw is super jaw dropping. Check it out.

Montrealer Nicholas Bernier debuted his piece Les Arbres, which combined a live mini string section (violin and cello) with sequenced material and live-sampled percussion instruments. That’s the first time I’ve seen someone bowing a xylophone, I tell you what. Visuals by urban9 were a montage of manipulated old photographs that told a ghostly tale. I noticed that the string players had sheet music, and Nicholas was working from – if not sheet music – then at least a list of cues. Sheet music?! Not something you expect to see at an electronic music fest.

Headliner Murcof took the stage with visual artists XX and XY. Murcof’s latest album is titled Cosmos and consists of sampled and manipulated classical instruments. It sounded at times like prepared instruments handled non-traditionally, like direct contact with the harp of a piano and some acoustic guitar thumps. The visuals worked beautifully with the music, and added to the sense of terrible beauty and majesty that Murcof evokes with his cosmic sounds. I wondered if the audience was meant to see faces and figures in the drifting textures – they were there and also not there, it seemed. I’m still trying to process and describe exactly how this performance made me feel – it was entrancing and alarming. The crescendos stabbed through me like a knife. Here’s some youtubery of an earlier performance:

Nocturne 1

Later the same evening, I had my bones shaken by the hammering bass of Detroit’s Interstellar Fugitives. Detrooooooit!