TIM HECKER with STEPHEN O’MALLEY, GREENSPAN/SEALEY/LANZA, ROLL THE DICE, A GUY CALLED GERALD at Mutek Music Festival. Rating: NNN
Saturday night at Mutek was the festival’s most anticipated event: a combinatory composition suite by recent Electronic Juno winner Tim Hecker and metal guitarist Stephen O’Malley.
St. James Church wasn’t just an ideal venue because of its hallowed, space-filling acoustics it provided an opportunity for the consecrated experimentalists to channel the full power of foreboding church organs.
Both O’Malley and Hecker are craftsmen – they carve meaning and complexity out of crests of sound and noise so tangibly dense you feel swaddled like a baby. The pleasantly vibrating pews also triggered back to some pre-sentient, babyhood impulse to doze off. If you need to zen out or zone out, go see a drone show in a church.
One amazing thing about Mutek has been the visuals – night after night, the installations and projections accompanying each artist have been mesmerizing in their own right. Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys) and Sealey upped the ante with a projection on the Satosphere dome, accompanying their reworking of classical material and new compositions for modular synthesizer.
Maybe it was the juxtaposition of the clean melodies and pure tones with a kind of ill-boding theme of the projections, but there was something in its linearity that felt almost psychedelic.
Metropolis slowly swelled to full toward the end of a tempestuous set by Swedish duo Roll The Dice, who eschew programmed tones and drum machines in favour of synths and piano.
They stood facing each other on stage – both in suspenders and rolled-sleeve shirts and work pants, like futurists come back from the 1940s – creating sustained, theatrical, heaving moments. More melodic and accessible than Hecker and O’Malley, but just as loud.
And British acid-house legend A Guy Called Gerald, making his first Canadian appearance in over five years, was a bit of a palette cleanser then, taking the night’s theme of big, big sound back to solid, 4/4 terrain.