The PAN M 360 team is criss-crossing the entire MUTEK 2024 program, observing as many artists as possible during this 25th edition of its Montreal version. Keep up with our experts until Sunday evening, as no other MUTEK event promises such extensive media coverage!
Another hipster darling reinvented himself at MUTEK as part of L’Événement spéciale de MUTEK, and not the least. Colin Stetson has been wowing the crowds for the past fifteen years with his novel use of saxophones. The effect of admiration lasted a long time, but we were due for a conceptual relaunch as we were losing interest.
A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan’s famous university town, Stetson chose Montreal in the 2000s, and has been seen playing with Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre and Bon Iver, as well as in spectacular solo and duo performances with violinist Sarah Neufeld, with whom he was in love for several years, and even with a chamber orchestra devoted to Henryk Gorecki – Sorrow, in 3 movements. The power of his circular breathing to produce a continuous sound, the use of contact microphones on his instrument and his own body, and his penchant for loops of notes recorded and superimposed in real time – these are just some of the features that have made his playing famous.
That said, this free-jazz and electroacoustic approach has tended to run out of steam in recent years… until Wednesday, that is, with the audience at New City Gas!
On the saxophones, including the imposing bass sax, Colin Stetson stayed the course as blower and (sometimes) simultaneous vocalist, using the same techniques, but this time with a post-industrial, darkwave, noisy, in short, much more violent version of this already highly dynamic music.
Stetson usually expresses himself with an overlay of three or four separate tracks, usually created in real time. This time, however, it was very muscular, very hard, and no one will complain. For those interested, the material played at MUTEK was recorded in the studio, and the album The love it took to leave you is due out in September on the Envision label.
Photo credit: Frédérique Ménard-Aubin
