07 | 06 | 10
The Wire in Mutek 7 June 2010
Mutek’s last day underlined how good the festival venues are – the picnic had to relocate to Metropolis because of the weather, but the club is hardly inferior, a large theatre with an old school dance floor and an upper circle where you could people-watch. The sound is so well engineered we could easily hold a conversation while the speaker next to us was blasting our Pepe Braddock’s discofied house. Considering the other venues such as Sat and Club Soda are sizeable venues too, it gives Mutek a real feeling of freedom and fluidity as you venue-hop.
Later on in Sat I was blown away once again by Moritz von Oswald trio, whose set was simply one extended track, with Vladislav playing percussion at the side of the stage, Moritz (dressed absoultely immaculately in a suit, tie, with hankerchief poking out of his pocket) playing keyboard lines and dubbing Vladislav’s percussion parts on the fly, and Max Loderbauer working on the far side of the stage. Half way through, those Rhodes-like keyboard lines (stuck through dozens of echoes) sounded like mercury slithering around the floor. You could have taken and looped any four bars from the middle of the performance and it would have made an extraordinarily good 12″. Organic’s the wrong word…. it ends up deliciously complex yet finely focused on the groove. Towards the end Mortitz elbowed some growling notes out of his keyboard John Lennon at Shea Stadium style, nudging Delay into even wilder drumming, and with that liberated gesture they concluded after fully 45 minutes.
Theo Parrish finished the festival off later, and he’s still is the DJ who seems to have records you only dreamed existed, and makes familiar tracks completely fresh. Cases in point: he opened with Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint”, crossfaded between House tracks and James Brown (“Ain’t It Funky”) and Fela Kuti (“No Agreement”) as if they were all extrapolations from the same eternal groove, and even made The Police sound good. Parrish throws his arms out as he bobs from his decks to his record box like a kid in his bedroom, and I definitely dig his weirdly tautological T shirt for his record label, “Sound Signature Sounds”. “Theo, you’re a god,” a dude behind me kept shouting. In the middle of such long tracks, he uses the EQ brilliantly, not punching in and out to give you cheap thrills (though there’s nothing wrong with that) as much as letting you feel the layers and the construction of the track. You walk away from the set feeling you’ve virtually been in the studio watching the tracks being made. In that sense, no matter how old school the tracks, Parrish’s sets always feel startlingly new. The sound was once again fantastic, LOUD but intimate.
Throughout Mutek, the music quality has been high – bar the occasional moment in the schedule when we were stranded wth nothing to do, there’s been a lot to soak up. Now back to London and a desk full of new CDs…
2009