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 19th, 2024, The Future Festivals Summit has launched the 10th 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: 

  1. Lightning Rods for Weak Signals
  2. Enablers of Serendipitous Discovery
  3. Creators of New Senses and Forms
  4. Fostering Connections and Communities Beyond the Filter Bubble 
  5. Additive & Regenerative Cultural Infrastructures
  6. 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 ShimizuRyuichi 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 ShimizuRyuichi 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.

Subscribe to our newsletter