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| Monolake @ Metropolis |
The beginning of our Montreal adventures beyond our hotel walls began as any adventure in Quebec should begin - a trip to St.Hubert's Chicken. St. Hubert's is a franchised roasted chicken joint that serves as some sort of baseline social denominator for Quebeckers. Unlike similar restaurants in Ontario and the US such as Swiss Chalet and Kenny Rogers Roasters - typically regarded as fine fare for a date with Grandma -- St.Hubert attracts a diverse range of ages groups and socio-economic classes. Make no mistake it is clearly not an ethnically diverse crowd - this is definitely Whitey's chicken -- but I am constantly amazed at the broad demographic appeal of the joint. Point in case, when we mention to a Quebec friend that we're not so sure that St.Hubert agreed with us so well that night - note: it certainly agreed with us a 4 in the morning eating it in bed and watching French Open tennis -- she immediately looked at us like we were crazy and asked "What? You don't like St.Hubert?" This is the kind of hold this place has on people here. I might also add that St. Hubert's sauce is fantastic but It is by no means Chalet Sauce, however both are excellently drinkable!
After dinner we headed toward the festival headquarters to get our guest passes, began meeting up with friends, making new ones and sitting down to witness our first A/V Showcase of the evening at Canada's historic Monument National Theatre.
The first performance Transmission by Ben Shemie consisted of two suitably vintage radio receivers on stage - while this would have been an otherwise frustrating attempt at avant-garde-ness that belonged more in a gallery setting than on stage - the piece takes on a new life when you understand that the work, which consisted of two separate radio broadcasts taking place simultaeneously on CKUT and CIBL thus the only way you could hear this work was by tuning in 2 radios at the same time. This very public and yet potentially intimate performance was another great example of how Mutek has grown to really imprint itself on the cultural landscape of the city - and i might add the piece, which was largely made up of long washes, found audio and field recordings - felt especially timely, not to mention joyous, when the sounds of Montreal's casseroles rang out over the airwaves.
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| Jelinek and Pekler play Ursula Bogner |
The second performance by Jan Jelinek & Andrew Pekler was perhaps the stand out of our festival experience thus far. An audio portrait inspired by the potentially fictional early synthesizer adopter Ursula Bogner - the work featured Jelinek and Pekler on a variety of vintage and contemporary gear, tape loops and also included photos drawing and linocuts purporting to form a visual archive of Bogners life and work, which seemed to be heavily inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich. The music which draws its sound palette heavily from early synthesizer experiments - think Delia Derbyshire, Raymond Scott - helped to create a compelling and touching narrative that was both inspiring and puzzling.
However as with most experimental music shows, there is a certain length of time one can possibly remain engaged and this work as engaging as it was seemed to come to a natural conclusion about three minutes before it actually ended. Otherwise this was a simply perfect performance by an artist I greatly respect and admire.
The lessons in perfect timing and audience patience presented by the previous artists however seemed lost on Pierre Bastien and Espen Sommer Eide in their Electric Folkways presentation. Faced with an audience who had been sitting for over an hour and a half now listening to heavily experimental music with no intermission, I was hoping for something short and to the point. Instead what we received was a drawn out performance filled with almost every experimental music cliche you could think of. From precious home built instrumentation - which admittedly was great for about three minutes - to pretentious jazz inspired noodling and improvisation, old looped film clips and robot voices. Again this could have been a great performance, as the audience got the point after about 15 minutes, but its insistence on continuing at what felt like over an hour was torturous.
Experimental musicians, no matter how great their ideas or concepts, need a time clock. let's say 45 - 60 minutes for a piece with narrative structure. Without narrative: 20mins. It should be rigorously enforced too.
After a quick smoke we headed off to Metropolis to catch sets by Shackleton, Monolake and Jeff Mills. All who delivered excellent listening sets from well within the comfortable ranges of their oeuvre, though Monolake's certainly ventured into bass oriented/IDM territories he hasn't visited in a very long time, While Mills' Approaching Moon performance seemed to find new context after seeing the Jelinek & Pekler work
Mostly the night was relaxed, involved touching base with festival friends and making plans for the following days - where to party on the weekend, who to have dinner with, when were you going to visit the CineChamber etc.
Fun Fact: St. Hubert is the patron saint of hunters and his legend is often tied into that of St. Eustache - the guy whose religious vision is depicted on the Jagermeister bottle. Ppl used to invoke St. Hubert to try to cure themselves of rabies.
Fun Tracks (promised you two) inspired by two artists im very excited to see tonight
and of course .... Nicolas Jaar's brilliant essential mix http://soundcloud.com/everybodywantstobethedj/nicolas-jaar-essential-mix-05
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