Late-Night Warehouse Ambiance for Juan Atkins All-Nighter at the SAT

by Julius Cesaratto

Techno’s godfather, Juan Atkins—one half of the pioneering duo Cybotron—took to the Société des Arts Technologiques to deliver an unmissable performance for techno purists. Celebrated as a founding force behind the sound born out of 1980s Detroit, Atkins gracefully delivered a classic techno set full of his signature melodies, distorted robotic vocals, and unmistakable use of the Roland TR-909—the drum machine that laid the foundation for techno itself.

He began the night slowly, layering mechanical sounds that gradually built in intensity—playing with frequencies as the dance floor warmed up. The SAT’s raw concrete pillars rose above the crowd like the skeletal remnants of a disused factory, a fitting backdrop for the industrial pulse of Atkins’ sound—at times harsh, yet always melodic.

Just blink, and you might find yourself suddenly transported to a pulsating Motor City warehouse in the early morning hours.

As the saturation of sound gave way and the lights flickered in deep shades of green, minimalist drum kicks gave way to the groovy, synth-laced melodies that have defined Atkins’ illustrious career as a producer and DJ. The multi-generational crowd of ravers in attendance was taken on a true sonic voyage—Atkins weaving his techno-futurist sound together with synths and bouncing funk basslines, a nod to his early influences.

Leaning on more than 40 years as a selector, he turned up the BPM, blending a rich array of styles—from early synth music to Italo-disco—without ever losing the core of his sound. The apex of the night came when he dropped Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase”, drawing cheers from the crowd. A brief flash of nostalgia, it lent itself perfectly to the groove of the night, echoing the roots of techno without ever feeling retro.

As a parting gift to the dancefloor, Atkins closed his two-hour set with a tasteful sprinkle of jungle—a fast-paced closer that left the crowd wanting more.

The sounds were industrial yet melodic; the layering of drums, bass, and synths was funky, seamless, and impeccably timed. A true artist behind the decks.

Publicité panam

Ambient / Experimental Techno / House / Techno

Friday night at the Dômesicle – All night long with Jump Source

by Z Neto Vinheiras

Vibrant and tireless—Jump Source, Montréal-based duo composed by Priori and Patrick Holland, don’t fail to keep the night on the beat and the dome with jumping feet—a five-hour uplifting set from techno, house to experimental and ambient, with a scent of ethereal and nostalgia at times.

Seemingly mechanical, the blend with organic states and grooves oozes this satisfaction and fluidity on the dance floor, morphing ambiance into atmosphere, sensorial into emotion. As captivating as it is, the duo certainly knows the art of keeping it going—grow, suspend, tension, release—like waves forming and breaking, one after another. A Jump Source set feels like going on a ride into multiple directions, through multiple landscapes, without ever losing the north nor the reason why we went for it in the first place—they can effortlessly carry us through the night in a consistent beat, not too fast, not too slow; the turns are smooth and tasty, we resurface to catch some breath and go back down to the pacing bass lines. It’s all about sculpting momentum on the dance floor, all night long.

Apart from their prolific solo projects, Francis Latreille and Patrick Holland have been collaborating as a duo for almost a decade, both in the studio as producers and in the club behind the decks, having recently released their sixth EP in April this year.

The collective Mostly Noise and Jonahvision guided our journey in the sweaty-sauna-like dome in immersive trippy visuals and virtual spaces, resonating the groovy aesthetics proposed by Priori and Holland on the decks.

Électro / euro-disco

Art of the Line: Klangkarussell’s Euro Vision at SAT

by Loic Minty

Late at night, Saint-Laurent is filled with comic book characters. They circle around their desires religiously, taking it all in by blocking it out with a cigarette and some chatter, only to dive right back into the abyss with fresh ears. Something bouncy and soft to catch your fall, but with just enough substance to entangle your attention. Trance. The Austrian electronic duo Klangkarussell has mastered the art of the line.

Before you know it, it’s under your feet, a rhythmic chord stabs as a bed for soulful vocals to stay in your head until you fall asleep. It’s textbook eurodance and vocal trance that blend in elements of disco, music meant to be shared that you fall in and out of. It’s the ambiance for the greater setting of social nightlife, where the chatter—gated by the heavy kicks—is part of the music. People cling together like bunches of grass announcing spring. I talk to a couple who tells me they came all the way from across the river to see Klangkarussell and begin to wonder where exactly these guys came from.

Gaining popularity around the same time as Avicii and Martin Garrix, Klangkarussell are part of the European exports that successfully blended pop hits with swelling build-ups and conventional chord progressions and rhythms. This late arrival of European electronic pop in North America was met with enthusiasm, as its simple formula had a trailing optimism that made you want to let go and be foolish. I remember it as the soundtrack to many early birthday parties, but judging by the older crowd, I can imagine it was just as popular in festivals during a recession era. Impressed by Klangkarussell’s ability to drive a crowd, I walked closer and closer to see what was happening. All smiles, their excitement was contagious as it announced the next rise and fall. Hands in the air pointing to the sky—when the anthem comes on, there are no limits to the mind.

As the night deepens, the dance floor becomes a kind of communion, and Klangkarussell and its quiet high priests. Their music doesn’t demand attention—it earns it, gently pulling people inward even as it lifts them up. In a world that feels increasingly fragmented, their sound offers a strange cohesion, a shared pulse. Watching the crowd sway under Saint-Laurent’s flickering lights, I realize this isn’t just nostalgia or escapism—it’s a reminder that sometimes, all we need is a rhythm to hold on to, and a place to lose ourselves in it.

Contemporary Jazz / Electroacoustic / Électronique / Experimental / Contemporary / Instrumental Hip Hop

African American Sound Recordings at SAT : Noise Floor

by Loic Minty

In a world of untraceable movements, this liquid form of music is barely contained by the term “experimental.” A post hip hop posts it exists only here and now, where hip hop has become more what is felt than what is heard.

And yet it is still everything that has made it, only noisier and further away, like a signal passing through old wires. African American Sound Recordings seems to look from above at this infinite network and finds the subtle voices, like Morpheus looking through the matrix for the human heart. “Where is that noise coming from?” After 20 minutes you start forgetting, after 30 minutes it has sucked you in, and after 45 minutes you are now a part of it.

Dismantling all expectations, A.A.S.R. sculpted a form beyond music, an anthropology to black culture: from punk, to 70’s soul, to a saxophone screeching like it was cursed by the Pharoah himself. There is an authenticity and an originality in his approach that seems to have been the common thread of this evening.

Slow Pitch Sound’s turntablist approach sent the crowd into a twilight zone. Mixing like he was on a cosmic trip with Lee Scratch Perry in Studio One, his chop and screw approach reminisced of classic scratching acts such as DJ Screw, while at the same time completely renewing it in his choice of samples. Finding loops in accidental sounds, Slow Pitch Sound crafted his rhythms on the spot and had the crowd hanging on his every move. The forgotten art of turntabling showed its untapped potential as an instrument and, combined with digital tools, built a warm and distinct sound made into art by the graceful mastery of his tools.

But the most unexpected surprise of the night was Dumb Chamber’s debut performance, as he showed Montreal the shape of electronic music to come. Always bringing you somewhere new, the dense patchwork of sequences teased rhythm and built up in swells of emotive orchestrations. Somewhere between Luc Ferrari, Dean Blunt, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Replica”, his sound was distinguished by a soothing mix of field recordings and sensitive melodies borrowing from classical orchestration.

Dumb Chamber had a big smile on his face as he effortlessly moved between genres; even his twist at classic house held a distinctive style, as noises uttered counter-rhythms in the background. The crowd, which could have been a Ssense staff party, may not have been as warmed up for dancing, but there was the feeling of deep listening and appreciation for the passionately researched sound experiments we were witnessing.

It was one of those experiences where you walk out not quite feeling the same as you walked in. Maybe it was the wall of low frequencies that got into your bones, maybe it was from sitting on the cold concrete, but it felt like a new space opened in imagining music as a performance that I look forward to exploring.

Contemporary

New European Ensemble open the 12th edition of M / NM

by Vitta Morales

The Netherlands-based New European Ensemble kicked off this year’s 12th edition of the Montréal Nouvelles Musiques Festival. The opening concert titled “Dynamite Barrel” showcased the work of innovative contemporary composers whose pieces on the night would adhere to this year’s theme: the marriage of music and images.

Heading into this concert with little information, I assumed that this meant music that evokes imagery but that ultimately each listener was to be responsible for their own imaginations. As I would soon see, each of the featured composers would run with this theme slightly differently.

The pieces are set out to represent locations, sonic evolution, historical periods, or a mixture of the three. Sometimes this was done, as it routinely is when it comes to new chamber music, by pushing the limits of textures and timbre; meaning that they contained all the florid passages, extended techniques, mixed orchestration, and meterless moments you would expect. For those who found this fatiguing, the piece Cyan Saturn, inspired by Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, provided some nice contrast as it contained some compositional conventions of jazz fusion which made for something a bit different.

Regardless, most of the pieces of the night would couple their music with images projected onto a screen and essentially require the players of the New European Ensemble to “score” the images live. In one piece this meant recontextualizing old Looney Tunes scenes; on another occasion, a Bollywood film; and at the very end, a surf rock piece superimposed with Thai music set to shadow puppetry.

When the musical scoring lapsed into what I would consider dense, pointillistic, or meterless soundscapes, I was much more tolerant of any shrieks and squeals when I could see they were in accordance with what was happening on the screen. The brain is funny that way. At other moments I felt some dense soundscapes overstayed their welcome. I can wholly admit that contemporary chamber music asks important questions of established practices when it goes down this route; my gripe is that it always seems to be the same questions. And they’ve been asked for more than a few decades at this point. Overall I would say the New European Ensemble interpreted for us some very interesting music, but I wasn’t about to rush to the merch

photos: Marie-Ève Labadie

Afro-Caribbean / Afro-Electro / Afrobeats / Electronic / House / Jazz / Neo-soul

MUTEK 2024 | Glowzicombo, The Start of An Exciting Adventure

by Alain Brunet

Producer G L O W Z I, trumpeter Chudyanna Bazile and bassist Amaëlle Beuze make up Glowzicombo. This, we observed on Friday at the SAT, is yet another remarkable emergence of Montreal Afro culture in the summer of 2024, beyond the brilliant recruits Club Sagacité and Moonshine whose inspiration we savored in July.

Multidisciplinary, the soon-to-be-famous G L O W Z I repurposes sound and visual archives, creating a universe where the progressive values of black feminism and feminine creation are unabashedly asserted in the immersive environment they’ve created for the Nocturne 4 night owls.

A sensual flow of neo-soul, hip-hop, ambient, dub, house, jazz, konpa, zouk, afrobeats and amapiano vibes. These grooves are the basis of a trio performance, with bass and trumpet as organic complements to these electronic proposals. Selected images, aesthetic and ethical questions and reflections are projected on the walls. By the way!

The instrumental execution is rather perfunctory, the trumpet having to stick to simple lines given the performer’s intermediate level, while the electric bass applies itself to reinforcing the groove developed by Glowzi. But the performers’ limitations don’t hold them back, and the strength of the ideas and emotions they convey outweigh these technical considerations in this case. Super vibe!

These young women are bright, inspired and brilliant, and they’re still in the early stages of a project that could make a real impact. If, of course, we make every effort to bring it to full maturity over the coming years.

Publicité panam

Electronic

MUTEK 2024 | Fred Everything, Innovating in What Makes People Dance

by Salima Bouaraour

Frédéric Blais aka Fred Everything is a pillar of the Montreal electronic music scene. His career, built up over 25 years, celebrates two birds with one stone at the Mutek Festival. Producer, DJ and manager of the Lazy Days Recordings label, Fred always concocts emotionally rich live sets that speak to as many people as possible. His ability to bring people together, while never neglecting innovation, is a technical feat of ingenuity that delivers refined, well-crafted sounds that are easy to listen to.

For the Nocturne 4 program presented at SAT, the crowd was treated to this classic: electronic music tinged with jazz, soul, downtempo and deep house. His album, Love, Care, Kindness & Hope , was released last May, and we were treated to a live presentation of the material.

Our favorite Montrealer delivered a magnificent performance that the mutékians tried to thwart with their hips. All arms were raised in celebration of one another in a message of love and serenity. A soaring, comforting live set. It really was.

Fred EverythingCA/QC – Love, Care, Kindness & Hope

Live︱World premiere

photo credit: Kinga Michalska

Publicité panam

House

MUTEK 2024 | Nosaj Thing & Jacques Green, Live Set in Tandem

by Alain Brunet

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!

Californian Jason Chung, aka Nosaj Thing, is a respected artist whose career has been on the move since the 2000s. From punk and experimental hardcore, he has gradually developed a language meaningful enough to attract giants such as Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus. His art extends beyond the world of music, and is much in demand in film, television and multimedia production. In the SAT’s main hall, he kicked off Wednesday’s very first hour with his eminent Montreal colleague Jacques Greene, a regular at MUTEK, Piknic and Igloofest, known for his singular declensions of house, future soul and other sub-genres mixed with brilliant insertions, including female declamations in French please. Nosaj Thing and Jacques Greene presented their first live set, a creative extrapolation of a long B2B DJ set tour. The tandem offered a conclusive set, typical of the Nocturne series: sonic exploration, conceptual audacity wrapped in better-known referents and, needless to say, conducive to nocturnal libations.

Photo Credit: Bruno Destombes

Publicité panam

MUTEK 2024 – Utopia or Oblivion

by Elsa Fortant

Held on August 19^th, 2024, The Future Festivals Summit has launched the 10^th edition of MUTEK Forum “Utopia or oblivion” at the Société des arts technologiques (SAT). The objective of the day was to bring together festival makers, artists, and audiences to explore innovative ideas and projects for the future of festivals. PAN M 360 attended the opening conference and here is what you should know about it.

The opening conference of The Future Festivals Summit, titled “From Festival as Lab to Temporary Utopias”, started by Drew Hemment asking two simple but complex questions: “Why do we do festivals? Why do they matter?”.

Drew Hemment is a British academic, artist, and curator known for his pioneering work in the intersection of technology, culture, and society. Hemment’s work spans across fields such as data science, AI, and design, and he is currently associated with the University of Edinburgh, where he contributes to projects like Future Festivals at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and works with the Alan Turing Institute.

During his presentation, Drew Hemment explored the evolution of festivals as platforms for innovation and social change. He began by tracing his journey from DJing in the late 80’s to founding FutureEverything in 1995, highlighting how his own practices are intricated in the research projects he is leading now, notably The New Real, a hub for AI, creative research and futures research, run as a festival.

Drawing on his experience with the FutureEverything, Hemment discussed the ethos behind festivals, emphasizing the need for prototyping methodologies and create tools at the crossroads of festival-making, critical theory and design methods. The Festival As Lab toolkit , FutureEverything Manual or the Future Festival Field Guide are perfect examples of what can be shared.

The UK scholar then put into light six key trajectories (not predictions!) for future festivals:

Lightning Rods for Weak Signals
Enablers of Serendipitous Discovery
Creators of New Senses and Forms
Fostering Connections and Communities Beyond the Filter Bubble
Additive & Regenerative Cultural Infrastructures
Catalysts for Planetary Intelligence

You can find the details of those trajectories, each one accompanied by a recommendation, in a (very accessible) article wrote by Hemment at https://www.holo.mg/dossiers/future-festivals-field-guide/#68760

Drew Hemment’s dedication to share his knowledge about interdisciplinary and socially engaged festivals highlights his belief in their essential role in shaping the future. However, to ensure their sustainability, it will require to face infrastructural challenges through collective effort, care, and determination.

Photo Credit: Maryse Boyce

Publicité panam

Electronic

MUTEK presents Nocturne 1 : Gaëlle Scali, Machina, Nicola Cruz, Totalement Sublime and Kaminska

by Rédaction PAN M 360

Gaëlle Scali

La musicienne et artiste plasticienne Gaëlle Scali, basée à Montréal, explore la dimension physique et immersive du son au travers de la performance électronique et de l’improvisation musicale.

Based in Montréal, musician and visual artist Gaëlle Scali explores the physical and immersive dimensions of sound through electronic performance and musical improvisation.

Machina

machìna est une artiste coréenne basée à Tokyo. Sa musique, profondément personnelle et enracinée dans l’individualité, prend tout son sens dans l’effervescence collective de la piste de danse d’une boîte de nuit.

machìna is a Korean artist based in Tokyo. Her music, deeply personal and rooted in selfhood, is paradoxically best experienced amidst the collective effervescence of a nightclub dancefloor.

Nicola Cruz

Le DJ et producteur équatorien Nicola Cruz fusionne aisément la cosmologie andine ancestrale et autres coutumes musicales folkloriques du monde entier en manifestations électroniques assurément contemporaines.

Ecuadorian DJ and producer Nicola Cruz effortlessly blends ancestral Andean cosmology and folkloric music customs from across the globe into decidedly contemporary electronic expressions.

Totalement Sublime

Le duo montréalais de pop expérimentale Totalement Sublime est formé de l’auteur-compositeur-interprète Élie Raymond et du musicien et vidéaste Marc-Antoine Barbier. Le binôme crée une musique autant introspective que dansante et ouverte, ayant des sonorités aux influences japonaises des années 80 (Yasuaki Shimizu, Ryuichi Sakamoto), mêlant des réflexes plus rythmés et funky à un angle plus abrasif et lo-fi.

Montréal-based experimental pop duo Totalement Sublime, consists of singer-songwriter-composer Élie Raymond and musician and videographer Marc-Antoine Barbier. The duo composes music that is simultaneously introspective and danceable, blending Japanese-influenced sounds from the 80s (Yasuaki Shimizu, Ryuichi Sakamoto) and funky rhythmic impulse with a decidedly more abrasive and lo-fi angle.

Kaminska

Kaminska est une artiste et économiste Montréalaise qui se spécialise dans la création de visuels génératifs. Elle s’inspire de la modélisation économique afin de créer des univers visuels mathématiques, peuplés par des formes colorées uniques et mystérieuses, flottant parfois devant d’immenses quadrillages animés, tel un ballet entre les points de données et les graphiques qui les modélisent.

Kaminska is a Montréal-based artist and economist who specializes in the creation of generative visuals. She is inspired by economic modeling to create mathematical visual universes, populated by unique and mysterious colored shapes, sometimes floating in front of large animated grids, creating a vast ballet between data points and the graphics that model them.

POUR ACHETER VOTRE BILLET, C’EST ICI!

Ce contenu provient de MUTEK et est adapté par PAN M 360.