After Detroit, Bill and I were super excited to be heading to Montreal for the MUTEK electronic music festival, most definitely one of the cooler festivals on the planet.
The Tuesday opening night cocktails gave us a taste of what was to come over the next few days, and they screened a great trailer/doco about Amon Tobin's amazing "Isam" audio visual show, which we were treated to the debut of the following night. It was most definitely the most amazing visual show I've ever seen, completely mind blowing.
MUTEK is a very different electronic music festival than Movement in Detroit, where attendees can participate in interesting music and technology workshops and presentations during the day, and are treated to live shows where the visual elements are just as important as the music. The gigs are spread out between multiple venues in Montreal, and every night you're sure to see something very experimental and unusual.
On the Thursday Serato hosted a couple of public workshops, the first was to introduce our latest products; ITCH 2.0, the Rane SL 4 for Serato Scratch Live, plus new ITCH controllers; the Pioneer DDJ-S1, Numark NS6 and Novation TWITCH. People got the opportunity to play with the controllers and ITCH 2.0 for the first time, and chat about their ideas with the Serato team. We also hosted a workshop on The Bridge, and the very talented JP Solis from New York's Dubspot DJ school gave a fantastic presentation of how he likes to perform with The Bridge in NYC clubs.
At night the MUTEK festival really comes alive, and on the weekend punters can dance and lunch in the sunshine at the Piknic Elektronik events. Some of the highlights we caught were Horror Inc, DJ Brace, Siriusmo, Modeselektor, James Holden, and closing out the festival with an amazing set on the final night - Wareika.
Much love to the MUTEK crew and thanks Montreal for turning it on for us.
After Montreal I said farewell to Bill and spent a few days in New York for meetings. I also got to catch up with our good mate Just Blaze at his new Stadium Red studio in Harlem, which was AMAZING. I definitely felt very privileged to get the grand tour from the man himself.
Next stop, London where I'm meeting up with Brigid to head onto the Sonar festival in Barcelona. If you're attending, make sure you stop by the SonarPro Forum, where we'll be teaming up with Ableton and Novation to demonstrate some of our newest technologies.