Since launching in Montréal in 2000, has travelled far beyond its original home, taking its meeting point between electronic music, digital art and technology around the world. Yet Montréal still feels central to the whole thing.
Spend a few days moving through the festival and it becomes easy to understand why. Electronic music spills into public squares, concert halls, galleries and a 360-degree dome. Artists rebuild albums live, discarded household appliances become instruments and Jeff Mills disappears into imagined dimensions of space and time. International names sit naturally alongside Montréal and Canadian artists, while the festival rarely feels detached from the city around it.
At Esplanade Tranquille, the festival’s free outdoor space in the centre of the city, works through dark, distorted electronics and heavy low-end, steadily building towards deeper techno. later switches direction completely, moving from house and disco towards increasingly glitchy, pop-facing territory. It’s a fairly dramatic change, but the crowd barely seems fazed. If anything, each new direction is greeted with the same enthusiasm. That becomes noticeable throughout the week: Montréal audiences seem happy to be taken somewhere unexpected.
Local duo offer a simple explanation when I speak to them. “Taking a left turn in a DJ set here is encouraged,” they say. “People love a curveball.” One of the week’s best examples arrives with . Beginning somewhere between progressive electronics and liquid acid, the duo gradually tighten the screws towards techno, live instrumentation cutting through banks of electronics as they bounce around the outdoor stage in striking masks. The whole thing carries considerably more joy than its heavier moments might suggest.
More interesting is who is watching. Kids sit around the public area, families stop to take a look and local fans remain locked in. MUTEK doesn’t need to simplify experimental music to make it accessible; putting it in the middle of the city seems to be enough. The daytime gives more context to the ideas running through the festival, moving across digital art, immersive technology, AI and tools for live performance. Listening sessions happen throughout, including Jump Source taking the audience through their album ‘Fold’ in full, while workshops and talks explore the technology behind visual and immersive work.
Whose Music Is It? Care, Capital and Accountability in Electronic Music, featuring , and others, looks at ownership, acknowledgement and how sounds tied to specific places and cultures are used by the wider industry. A useful reminder that progress in electronic music isn’t only about finding a newer machine.
Japan’s take technological experimentation somewhere considerably more playful. The collective turn discarded appliances, electric fans, CRT televisions, barcode scanners and more, into homemade instruments. Machines break and are fixed, while buzzing electronics move into almost orchestral sounds. Nothing feels sleek or futuristic; it’s physical, chaotic and extremely fun. That instability runs throughout MUTEK’s live programme, where premieres and developing shows often feel like works still being figured out in front of an audience.
‘Fold’ is one of the year’s standout electronic records, moving the duo beyond the club tracks of their earlier releases. Live, they deliberately leave space for it to change. “The songs are set,” they explain, “but how we get from song to song and the arrangement of each song changes each time.” Later that night, the thinking becomes clearer. Red light washes across SAT as the ‘Fold’ material is pulled into a remarkably clean live performance without ever feeling rigid. The setup works almost like a band, rhythm handled on one side while melody, harmony and vocal processing move around it.
provides perhaps the clearest example. Their performance slowly emerges from industrial textures before warped, muddied drum & bass forces its way through, giving the show a feeling of controlled instability. “MUTEK was a great push and motivation to really explore the concept of doing a live performance,” gyrofield tells me afterwards. With this being their first live set, the festival’s support was important too: “MUTEK were hugely supportive in getting the live show off the ground.”
That balance between preparation and risk reaches its clearest point with . With Donato Dozzy unable to perform due to illness, Neel presents the project alone at Maison symphonique. For such a huge concert hall, the performance feels remarkably intimate. Voices From The Lake’s signature aquatic sound is immediately recognisable, but live it carries noticeably more drive than on record. Deep rhythm moves beneath slowly evolving, submerged textures, at points making sitting still feel almost unnatural.
“You have the bass and the rhythm and the aquatic sound, and that’s all made on fly,” Neel explains afterwards. He had considered creating a more defined structure beforehand, but found the idea restrictive rather than reassuring. “I need to have a blank page,” he says. “Otherwise, I don’t get the emotion.” He would rather risk an imperfect moment than arrive with everything already built. “You are there on stage to play. And you have to play.”
It’s an approach shaped over years. Neel recalls a Tokyo show where he and Dozzy began with ambient music and continued live for around seven and a half hours, deliberately without a backup. Having one, he argues, always leaves a shortcut available. For him, that uncertainty is what makes live electronic music different from working in the studio. “It brings you to the essence of what music is.”
Friday night brings considerably more physical weight. moves through bass and dub beneath huge illuminated tentacles curling around the stage. A packed crowd locks into the low-end as the set travels through different corners of bass music. follows in similarly soundsystem-minded territory, dubby elements cutting through a dark red live show before gyrofield pulls things somewhere murkier and more fractured.
Then operates on a different scale. Stargate imagines travel through a cosmic portal across five dimensions, each opening another chapter in the performance. Space and science fiction have followed Mills throughout his career, but here sound, visuals and lighting expand those ideas into something beyond a conventional techno set.
Saturday changes the temperature again. At Maison symphonique, provide one of the weekend’s more restorative moments. Fennesz’s electronics gradually unfold while blurred organic visuals float and dissolve across the screen, moving through two distinct sections without demanding an obvious climax. Later, provides almost the inverse at SAT. Otherworldly sounds, huge stage presence and an intensity difficult to easily categorise make it one of the stranger sets of the weekend. Everybody seems enamoured, it’s hard to look away.
Upstairs at SAT sits the , a 360-degree projection dome where the audience lies beneath the visuals. M. Salaciak & VJ BunBun take over the space with thumping house and huge red structures that seem to build themselves above the crowd in time with the beat. At points it feels almost anime-inspired, a digital city constantly assembling and collapsing overhead.
By the time and play one after another later that night, the timing feels right. Facta’s loose, percussive club music gives way to Ben UFO’s floatier house and exploratory selections, the right kind of release after several days of concentrated live and AV performances. Above them, suspended geometric forms shift as lighting and projections move across their surfaces, but the room remains focused on the dancefloor. More than 25 years after its first Montréal edition, MUTEK’s influence now stretches well beyond the city. Yet its original home still feels essential to why the festival works.
Artists are given room to develop ideas, while audiences seem equally willing to stay with them as those ideas take shape. The best moments arrive when homemade instruments break, live sets wander somewhere unplanned, a huge concert hall somehow feels intimate or an entire digital city builds itself above your head.
For a festival so interested in the future, MUTEK still understands something fairly simple: sometimes you have to give artists enough space to not quite know what happens next.