I'm using the shaky wifi on the VIA Rail train to "blog" at you today... yes indeed, I'm on my way to Montréal, to check out the 11th edition of the annual MUTEK International Festival of Digital Creativity and Electronic Music. Though well regarded around the world, especially in Europe and Mexico, MUTEK remains little known in Toronto outside of our dwindling techno scene. Which is a shame, because there's some really cool stuff on the program every year, and the international quality of the acts puts the festival up there with Pop Montreal, Victoriaville and Guelph Jazz, among other Canadian festivals of off-the-radar music.

If you're wondering why I'm skipping town and leaving for Mutek mid-week, that's because some of the most interesting programming happens on Wednesday and Thursday. It's kind of strangely entertain to watch Mutek mutate from a chin-stroking experimental music fest into a pounding techno party over the course of five days. Tonight at Monument-National, the festival's "A/Visions" stream presents "Pandora's Music Box," an evening of unusual music-making machines. I'm excited as always for Matmos, the Baltimore-via-San Francisco duo renowned for their found-sound recordings — their 2001 LP A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure famously made use of the sounds of surgery — though tonight M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel will exclusively use vintage synths such as the MOOG Voyager, the ARP 2600 and the
Stylophone. Also on the program is Montreal's [The User], presenting their infamous symphony for dot matrix printers, and Nicolas Bernier and Martin Messier's La Chambre des Machines, a performance piece inspired by the intonarumori, musical proto-robots invented almost a century ago by Italian futurist composer Luigi Russolo.

I'll be blogging daily on my Mutek adventures, and I've already come up with tomorrow's headline: Nous sommes les robots. What do you guys think?