The PAN M 360 team brings you comprehensive coverage of MUTEK Montreal 2023. Here’s a selection of the best performances on Saturday night at Théâtre Maisonneuve, as part of the A/Visions series.

Crédits photos : Nina Gibelin Souchon

Hatis Noit

“I only use my voice, is it okay to play at Mutek?” This was the question Hatis Noit posed during her first address to the crowd. The London-based Japanese artist effectively had only a loop pedal and projections as technological hardware, operating the bulk of her art from her vocal folds. From a technical point of view, Noït was impressive, moving easily from operatic singing to yodeling very close to what Eastern European singers do in traditional music. Imitations of animal cries and other textures were also on the menu. Voices were superimposed in arrhythmic textures, always tonal. However, the composer did not take a maximalist approach, her pieces limiting their thickness to a few loops. The various melodic layers were therefore always perceptible to the ear wishing to break down the mass. With her movements and stage presence, the artist delivered a performance out of the ordinary, and one of the most unique of the festival. Verbal communication with the crowd between pieces and Yuma Kishi’s projections were a bonus. Even with sound alone, the show would have been just as captivating. Yes, Hatis Noit, it’s okay that you’re playing at Mutek!

DATUM CUT

Behind his screens and synthesizers, Maxime Corbeil-Perron composed a massive yet harmonically simple drone. One had the impression of being immersed in a chord throughout the entire performance, the artist taking the time to deconstruct and vary the harmonic content in all its forms. A complex sequence of rougher sounds was added to this relatively static framework. With no discernible pulse, the composition was nevertheless highly rhythmic, with rapid, sporadic percussive attacks. The music developed in micro-montages, revealing complex sonic events hidden within the overall texture. The highs seemed to have been filtered, which clearly softened the aggressiveness of the noisier sounds. Aesthetically, it was reminiscent of a band like Yellow Swans, who develop a form of “harmonic noise”. Visually, photographs of metallic textures alternated with computer-generated images in a neon palette. Inex.materia was a good example of an accessible work informed by academic practice. This is just one of the sonic manifestations of Corbeil-Perron, who operates under several aliases.

SPIME.IM

Italian collective SPIME.IM certainly don’t beat about the bush when it comes to kicking ass. In duo format, the artists began the performance in a rather minimalist fashion, with rhythmic industrial and noise music lit up by white strobes. But it soon became much more eclectic… and political. All the abjections of our contemporary world were represented: military culture, digital individualism, pollution, overconsumption, materialism, obscenity, the destruction of the natural world and so on. These images were decomposed and recomposed in sequences that were sometimes refined, sometimes visceral. Particularly striking was a long mise en abîme in which the pixels of each new image expanded to plunge into new images, which in turn expanded to reveal new images. There was something therapeutic about seeing all these representations of violence being reused in an artistic way.

The music, always highly experimental, became increasingly intense, hammering out highly saturated sounds with a few echoes of harmony when the desired dramatic effect demanded it. For example, a sudden progression of chords interspersed with silences allowed the words “Where are we going then? to appear one by one. This passage, like many others in the performance, could well have closed the number. Perhaps that was SPIME.IM’s flaw: not knowing when to stop. The dramatic climaxes were so frequent that the audience applauded them like the end of a solo in a jazz show. In short, the audience was treated to a scathing critique of the media images that pervade our daily lives. The apocalyptic soundtrack accompanying these surging clichés skilfully underscored the brutality of the issues we face. Captivating from start to finish.