Every year for a quarter century now, Montreal’s become a living laboratory of stages and venues. It all syncs up, forming a single network of syncopated rhythms and flickering pixels, where sound systems and projectors open wormholes into other worlds.
Everything pulses with audio-visual experiments, late-night dance sets, and rich ideas that almost feel like they’ve arrived a few years ahead of schedule.
In a word? That’s MUTEK.
(clockwise from top left) Salar Ansari, Myriam Bleau & Nien Tzu Weng, DJ Hermano & OJPB, and No Plexus performing at MUTEK in 2024. | Photograph: Salar Ansari / Vivien Gaumand
It’s an annual festival and test site for what’s next in music, art, and the technology that binds them. Across all kinds of open-air stages and immersive rooms, it creates space for artists to push beyond what’s safe, polished, and predictable and enter new territories: Some deconstruct genres while others bend circuitry to speak new languages, but all of them prove that digital creativity is just as much about tools as it is about what you dare to do with them.
MUTEK’s reach is global, but its grounding in Montreal makes it a rare meeting point: local heavy-hitters sharing space with artists seeing the city for the first time, all connected by an unspoken agreement that here, it’s safe to take risks—not for technology’s sake alone, but for what happens when people push it to its limits in real time.
Breaking boundaries between the digital and physical
At MUTEK, the line between screens and stages or codes and craft is blurred until dissolved. The festival is known as a time to experience sound and image as living, reactive forces, shaped in the moment by the people manipulating them.
Whether it’s a drum hit triggering a cascade of visuals or a synth line bending in response to the artist’s hands, you’re inside a conversation between the digital and the physical. Consider the artists performing: While they are fluent in the language of the digital, they often keep a hand firmly in the analog world. Many of its most compelling performances are rarely purely digital.
Valentina Magaletti builds her performances around drums, vibraphone, and physical objects, finding the right balance between organic touch and electronic collaboration: “I love scarcity… working with few elements that can actually address what you’re trying to say.”
Her practice is about touch—the skin of a drum, scraping against a found object—but she doesn’t see that as something opposed to electronics. “You can find your own tools and your own voice, even through digital content.”
For Newfoundland-born modular synth artist Cleo Leigh, the tactile nature of hardware is essential: “It’s not pre-recorded… my whole set at MUTEK will be hands-on,” she explains ahead of her scheduled performance. “It’s an intersection, and you can’t do one without the other in my case.”
That intersection—where technology amplifies physical presence rather than replacing it—runs throughout the festival’s programming, from music to installation work like that of Public Space, Latent Space by Danny Perreault and Victor Drouin-Trempe. Their installation combines real-time visuals and sound design, each feeding the other in ways that blur where the physical ends and the digital begins.
“It can be a good access door for the world of electronic arts… people can have a playful way to discover the possibilities of this kind of art that isn’t a traditional way to compose and create,” explains Victor.
Nothing exists in a vacuum at MUTEK—the physical is expanded through technology, and technology takes on new dimensions through physical interaction.
Experimentation at the heart of it all
If there’s one through-line in every conversation with MUTEK’s performers, it’s that the festival is a space where risk is encouraged, even expected. Cleo Leigh calls it “one of the only places where [artists] really get to push boundaries,” with emphasis on process over spectacle.
Martyn Bootyspoon, a Montreal native, takes it further, contrasting MUTEK’s openness with the caution he sees elsewhere. He uses the festival as a place to push into new territory, test ideas, and see how they land in a context where risk-taking is the norm. “Promoters [in other countries] are afraid to put on experimental, weird, boundary-breaking stuff… here, they’ll take a risk on that.”
“MUTEK is one of the rare exceptions… from the beginning, they’ve tried to push boundaries and take risks. It’s not about how many followers you have, it’s about what you’re proposing,” adds Victor Drouin-Trempe.
Danny Perreault agrees: “They totally trust the artist. They saw our work in the studio after our residency… they never tried to change anything. They’re super open to experimentation and ideas.”
That unpredictability is part of MUTEK’s appeal for many—and it’s also what attracts so many artists from beyond Canada. The Poland-based Kenyan artist Slikback, for example, frames it more bluntly: experimentation isn’t optional, it’s the whole point—building, breaking, and reshaping live until something unexpected emerges.
“Instinctually, (MUTEK) just feels like it's the place (to play)... My work is a kind of experiment in itself… everyone is so forward thinking that if I were to do something weird, it wouldn’t be received weirdly like it would in a club setting,” he says.
Community and cross-pollination
For all the talk of process and experimentation, what artists hope for from an audience is often simple: The end goal is technical execution, but it’s also connection.
“If even a gram of my enthusiasm can remotely be contagious… that’s my ultimate idea of success,” says Magaletti.
Leigh agrees: “I want people to feel the emotions that I’m trying to convey and hopefully make a connection.”
Slikback and Martyn Bootyspoon as well—all of these artists want the physical proof of bodies moving and heads nodding to know their sets have landed.
As for Perreault and Drouin-Trempe, they too see interaction as key to their contributions to MUTEK. They describe their collaborations as fluid exchanges where visuals and audio develop in tandem, informed by the festival’s multidisciplinary atmosphere and how people engage with their project.
“It shows that it attracts people from around the world… sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s new—and that’s what keeps people coming back,” says Drouin-Trempe.
The portal’s open at MUTEK. Step through.
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