Sometimes Mutek is a giant rave. Friday night, the festival moved around the corner to Metropolis, a swank if generic club that probably sees a whole bunch of rock shows the rest of the year. The main room is around 1,500 (rough guess) capacity and it has a smaller side room for 400 more; it feels a bit like Sonar rendered by M.C. Escher. The whole thing sold out fast, and the smaller room, a carpeted, chandeliered, bilevel space with a curtained wall, had a one-in-one-out line for most of the night. It was packed enough that if you weren't dancing you'd get douche faces for wasting the space. I only caught Dave Aju in there and made plenty good use of my floor space, thank you very much. Aju, grinning and bopping along behind his laptop/mixer setup like an old jazz man, has a style hard to pin down, a kind of progressive minimal techno built of big foggy bass melodies, sharp nonrepetitive percussion, and big groovy horn solos.
Kid Koala, Modeselektor, and whatever kind of backstage reactor provided Modeselektor's bass dominated the big room. There aren't many more DJs more pleasurable to watch than Koala. The master turntablist is so obviously in love with what he's doing--always a wide smile on his round face--it's infectious, and the things he can do with a turntable or four are astounding. This time around saw him literally bust out a blues riff by way of pitch bending and really, really precisely scratching--in a sense, "bowing" the groove with the needle--a record. Simply amazing.
And, in terms of electronic music stage shows, Modeselektor--the only band I know with both its own flag and font--ground Justice to dust. For one, the stage at Metropolis is lined by massive light tubes and backed by a similarly massive LED screen, which is itself backed by foot-wide multicolored spotlights. On top of it, the room is pocked with high-power halogen lights that, when deployed more than a few times a minute, sort of made you want to throw up. You imagine that the next morning the floor of the place is covered in burned-in silhouettes, as if some kind of mini nuclear apocalypse. The visuals were done by Berlin's Pfadfinderei, who was set up at the opposite end of a long table onstage from the Modeselektor duo mixing images live off a pair of laptops and three close-circuit monitors.
Modeselektor--a weird hybrid of dubstep, electro, ambient, and hip-hop that records for Ellen Allien's Bpitch Control label--played for about an hour and a half and covered a pretty wide swath through its back catalog, including last year's bass-fuck Happy Birthday. Getting hit by the pair's low end is quite literally like getting hit by the blast wave of an explosion, only sustained for more than long enough to wind someone insufficiently messed up enough up into severe anxiety. (Quoth my traveling companion: "I think it damaged my uterus.") And the bass just gets worse and worse/better and better. Modeselektor is like the grand high master of the bass drop. When it happens the crowd goes apeshit, starts screaming and twirling around in a vibrating stupor. When the pair let it drop on "Hyper Hyper"--"I need a hyper bass drop," drag the song on for another couple of measures, and then let out a sound like truck down-shifting in the seat next to yours, complete with a spray of champagne at just the right moment--it felt like the world was imploding. We might suggest a Baltimore/Berlin bass-off.
This was some eight to 10 hours after we started the night back at SAT, sometime well before dinner, dancing along with 500-600 already stinky, sweaty, and drunk festivalgoers to Argentina's Chic Miniature, who pry open already near-perfect minimal tracks with MPC pad polyrhythms. Walking out of a club at 7 in the evening with weak legs, ringing ears, and a buzz knowing the night hasn't even started yet isn't a bad way to be.
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