We conclude with our friend Primus Luta this series on the Decibel Festival, both a compelling portrait of that event and a slice of the world of electronics and computer music today. Be sure to catch the other three portions of his series:

Decibel Log 1: Ean Golden, Gold Panda, Mux Mool, Lusine, Pantha Du Prince

Decibel Log 2: Robert Henke, Room40 Label, Flying Lotus and Friends

Decibel Log 3: Murcof, Mount Kimbie, Modeselektor, Teebs and More

Beneath the shadow of Seattle’s Space Needle, a tent has been erected in front of the open park green, which is enclosed by a fence. This isn’t the first time that Decibel has brought the festival to the park, but it does mark the first time that the public is being charged for it. In the early afternoon, while tourists flock to the landmark’s everyday attraction, around the perimeter, more than a few have found spots to lay down blankets for the afternoon free of charge.

Inside, divisions continue. The “dance floor” is in the front of the stage, under the tent. Behind the dance floor, artist Eric Orr is doing a live painting in front of couples and families picnicking with Decibel in the park, and behind them, in the beer lounge, Guinness is being served on tap. In spite of the partitioning, the speakers act as a uniting force, by way of the heavy dubstep being spun by Mat the Alien.

The sound in the park is big. Tourists travel to the top of the Space Needle only to discover the bass is traveling the 520 feet up to rattle windows. Matt is working the system to his advantage, allowing the volume to grow dynamically, coaxing a physical response out of the audience. Latecomers make their way in, filling out the lawn and invading the dance floor. As Mat’s set comes to a close, NastyNasty takes his turn at the controls, bringing a palpable energy the crowd almost instantly reflects back to him.

The heavy brostep is infectious; the dance floor is alive. It’s a strange lead-up to the more ambient hip-hop sound to follow. Some artists in a similar situation might find the setup a bit unnerving, but as Nosaj Thing sits in the wings rather than worry he enjoys himself, headnodding to the beat. As he sets up his laptop, the crowd packs in tighter. Then, with the press of an MPD pad, Nosaj shows why his peers consider him a true Ableton master.

While Bluetech takes the dB in the Park stage, other festivalgoers are packing in for the second Optical concert at the Benaroya Concert Hall. This evening there is noticeably more gear on stage, and apparently Noveller has it in her mind to throw as much as she can into her set. Loopers and pedals modify her guitar that is voiced using everything from scissors to packing bubbles. Behind her, the projection screen is filled with moving images that add a creative and intimate touch.

Between their onstage interactions and the way in which their two mediums are work together, one might think that musician Fennesz and visualist Lillevan were a touring act. The truth is that they just met at the festival and yet somehow developed a synergy bringing their work to its full potential.

Oneohtrix Point Never wears a headlamp while standing in front of his mixer and controller rack in complete darkness. His face is spotlighted, and glare from the headlamp on the equipment makes for an interesting effect on its own. Paired with the stunning visuals of Killingfrenzy, however, it all starts coming alive. Faces and figures pop from the screen with an eeriness pulled from scenic noise of Oneohtrix.

As people file out of the second Optical show, the doors are opening at the Baltic Room where Scuba has brought the Hotflush heavy weights to get the intimate dance floor going. Incyde gets things started with a seamless mix of the label’s signature melodic dubstep. As his set moves into Untold’s, the energy builds. A little harder, but no less melodic, the mood shifts from showcase to party. When label head Scuba takes to the decks rocking a Run-DMC style “Bro Step” t-shirt, the place is rocked into a frenzy. The small venue is now packed to the gills with people dancing. It sets a fine stage for the latest addition to the label, Sepalcure, who come ready to throw down a live Ableton duet session. Unfortunately the Baltic system is still recovering from the previous night. They manage to work their way through the set, but there’s an obvious sense of something missing throughout: the bass.

At Neumos, the system is keeping up with the heavy bounce as electronic music legend Kevin Saunderson traces techno back to its Detroit roots for the D25 Showcase. He’s jet lagged from a flight earlier in the day from China, but takes to the stage with the professionalism of a globetrotting superstar, because he is one, and whether the crowd knows this or not, they can feel it. The dance floor is packed, filled with smiles and slippery with sweat, as Saunderson spins a soulful set that does not give one’s legs one seconds rest.

If you never associated Detroit techno with big drums, Carl Craig sets things straight from the first needle drop. Easily the hardest hitting kicks of the entire festival, they never let up their pounding the whole time Craig is at the helm. Like Saunderson before him, however, the drums serve as a characteristic not the emphasis. The emphasis is a shared between the melodies and grooves, which keep the crowd screaming in approval while the kick holds them to the beat.

A misty rain starts as staff ushers people out. Traffic is headed toward afterparties on the edges of the city. The rain lingers with the crowds outside the Motor afterparty where Pezzner, Soul Clap, and Theo Parrish are keeping the four steady on the floor. Further down the block at Monkey Loft, beats are being slung by Dibiase, Devonwho, XI, and Lorn.

The sky has cleared by the early afternoon of the final day for Decibel. The faces in the park show signs of appreciation, for the sun, the music, and the festival for making it come together. On stage, Praveen of Sepalcure shows his credentials with a DJ set filled with grooves perfect for a Sunday afternoon. Mary Anne Hobbs picks up where Praveen leaves off and then shifts into next gear to the heavier side of dubstep. Finger guns are shooting and wings are taking flight as she takes Decibel through a set of bangers she helped make popular. The energy of the crowd matches her own, and she rushes onto the dance floor for her last track. With the crowd well warmed up, Hobbs passes control over to Rinse FM staple Plastician, who keeps the brostep knocking hard in the late afternoon sun.

As dusk sets in, the Triple Door invites festival goers into the seated dinner venue for the final Optical performance. It’s a beautiful room with relatively comfortable seating, but as a dinner venue, the “white noise” of waiters poses a challenge. The delicate balance between the stage and the kitchen becomes obvious during the first set by sanso-xtro. She sits on her knees before an array of electronics and other instruments and then carefully loops sounds from them into ambient melodies.

Decibel favorite Tim Hecker takes the stage next with Lillevan, who finds a way to breathe new life into his visuals through the emotive textures being inspired by Tim Hecker. From vivid colors to stark duality, the descriptors actively work on both the sonic and aural experience.

For the final Optical performance, Tycho begins solo with his ambient sound. The visual backdrop, which silhouettes him, works as moving graphic design, as calculated and precise as the modes within the music. He introduces the festival to his four piece set, which fills out the music with more organic textures.

At Neumos, the crowd for the Decibel Finale looks like they have been partying for five days, but they still have a little life left in them. Fax wastes no time getting them going with deep techno grooves. The soulfulness caresses while the beats force hands to clap out the steady rhythm.

Robert Henke is joined by Tarik Barri on visuals for a Monolake set for future Decibel Festivals. His crisp drums are split into surround sound so that kicks are coming from behind while the snare cracks in the front. Behind him the visuals of collaborator Barri are an animated portrait of Henke’s computerized soul, starting and stopping into a multimedia dance personified on the dance floor. It speaks to everything Henke said in his earlier lecture as well as the type of convergence Decibel is trying to exemplify with the festival.

Pepe Bradock plays the final set for the evening. It is up and lively, but after five days, well past midnight hour on a Sunday bodies are telling festival goers it is over before the staff can put them out. They go back to their everyday lives with what they were able to extract from the densely packed portrait of electronic music in 2010. It is broad in scope, with an audience that continues to grow, and sounds that continue to evolve into different forms, honoring the history and embracing the new, so that it may continue, as strong and stronger, in the years to come. Is that a description of the festival or the music it represents both? It works for both, and for that reason Decibel Festival 2010 can be seen as a success.

CDM has ongoing coverage from the Mutek festival; see more dispatches at events.noisepages.com. Liz talks to A/V duo Rechenzentrum for CDM — and there’s a bit of a revelation at the end of the interview. -Ed.

Rechenzentrum, which means “data processing center” in German, is a Berlin-based duo who create live audio-visual performances by combining austere film visuals with their own brand of minimal techno, fusing elements of jazz, dub, and early industrial. Marc Wieser handles the music half while Lillevan navigates the visual landscape. Their 2003 DVD release Director’s Cut, originally out on Mille Plateaux, went on to win the Ars Electronica prize. Marc and Lillevan sat down with us after their sound check for A/Visions 2 at Mutek 2008.

Liz: What goes on in a live Rechenzentrum performance?

Lillevan: I do the video; Marc does the music. The video is live in the sense that I determine which image gets shown at which second, but obviously I’m not creating the image in real time because I’m not really interested in that. Real-time-created video usually looks pretty “blocky,” and I don’t really like it that much. It’s a mixture of pre-recorded video coming off a hard disk and live stuff reacting off of Marc’s music. But we’re not connected by any kind of MIDI connections or sound analysis. I just listen to his music and create stuff based on that. It’s a connection between our persons and not between our computers.

Marc Weiser: This way it’s improvised, for sure.

L: [The performance project is] called Silence like the last DVD, so it’s a live re-working of [the A/V album] introducing new elements that Marc has created in the last month. It’s based on the last DVD but it’s an updated, newer version.

M: It’s not 100% the same every time.

In the press release for Silence you said you consider video as an instrument. What do you mean by that?

L: We wanted to make sure people didn’t misunderstand our project — as in one guy’s doing music and there’s visuals accompanying music. We wanted to say it’s equally important; [it's] media being presented to the public. It’s their responsibility to put these two media together in any way they see fit or to ignore one and focus on the other. And so we said that sound can also be a color, music can be a color, music can be a “filmic” narrative element in the same way as film can be an instrument. That’s where that quote came from.

How did you two come together to work with video and music?

M: Totally by accident—we met in a squatted house around 11 years ago in Berlin—we had a club there and were both working there. After that we decided to work together. It wasn’t planned.

L: We were also part of an eleven-piece live drum and bass band which was a lot of fun. But we also realized how tiring it could be with eleven people who have very different focuses in life, willing to dedicate various amounts of time to this. We were willing to take more risks, willing to put stuff in Marc’s car, drive off somewhere, play somewhere, and see what happens — and that’s easier to do when you’re two people than eleven. Then we started actually getting gigs in Berlin for techno parties, where the promoter would have some pretentions to be artistically inclined and wanted to have a chill-out room with some more interesting stuff than just “four [on] the floor,” So they asked us to do it because our influences in those days were incredibly varied. We would play for hours and hours just mixing as much material as possible. Like Lee Perry said, the mixing desk is the instrument—for me it was video, lots of TVs plugged in and stuff. And we played everything—the whole history of experimental media mixed to layers over more layers. And over the years we whittled that down from 11-hour shows to a one hour performance. There was never a concept where we sat down and thought, “What shall we do? Let’s try this.” It kind of evolved over the years.

Along the lines of evolution, it seems that in electronic music there’s been an increasing focus on integrating music with visuals–although within the history of art it’s had a long history in its own right. Why do you think this relationship of music to to video has become so important of late?

L: The history is very long. Hundreds of years ago Leonardo da Vinci tried to make pianos that also create light with candles and colored paper, so this idea of using various media is nothing new. Warhol was doing it in the 60s, by projecting his own film Chelsea Girls on the Velvet Underground as they played. I always found it interesting with him that when he noticed the audience was starting to like it, he would get irritated and immediately change the films. It wasn’t supposed to make people feel lounge-y and happy; it was supposed to be irritating. We never had a concept when we started; it was just that Marc was a musician and I’m a filmmaker, so we said let’s see if these two things work.

Over the years I’ve seen some things where I was surprised that some musicians would allow video [projection] that they hadn’t seen before by artists they’d never met before. At some video festivals I’ve seen stuff where I really felt that the videos destroyed the music, and I’ve felt sorry for the musicians when that happens.

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

M: We were never interested in synchronization; maybe it’s a powerful thing that we never thought about things like that. You have to be “this is your part,” “this is [my] part,” be as good as you can, bring it onstage. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not.

L: It’s interesting for us to watch how people have tried to plan their careers within a certain genre—they go to festivals and see what’s happening now and try to order their set to that. Without trying to sound too punk-ish or rebellious, we were never like that, at the risk of getting less shows at times or more shows other times. You’d see people would be like, “Oh, you’re not really into tech and you’re not programming all your own software,” and we just never did that. I mean now I’ve gotten into programming Jitter and Max/MSP in the last years, and even that bores me and I get someone else to do it for me—a student of computer arts in Serbia, because I just have no interest in programming whatsoever.

I think a lot of what we did was we actually, like, irritated people, as well — it’s in our nature to not always give people what they want because it can be very clinical and very boring. We were invited a lot to play, for example, in museums, museum openings and such. It was very interesting for me to look “OK, why is a museum asking us to do this?” and it was quite obvious that the museum needs street credibility, [needs] youth culture … to get people to actually visit the museums and buy tickets so they get more money. So we thought, in this case let’s not be really arty. Let’s give them really asocial hard techno. And then at other times we’d be invited to play in really techno places and we’d do remixes of Miles Davis, which earned us lots of Coca-Cola cans being thrown at us. And it wasn’t about trying to be bad boys. It was just trying not to be too precious about your career and “oh, don’t make a mistake here, there’s an important curator in the audience, let’s not make a mistake tonight.” You can do that, and maybe you’ll have a successful career doing that, but I find it very boring.

I see that the Silence DVD is out on Weiser music; why did you start your own label now?
M: We were unlucky with all our labels, more or less. The first they didn’t understand what we were doing — the first CD only had music, the second we had only one visual track, the third on Mille Plateaux… it takes so much time from creating the music and the visuals until the release — years. I decided [to do] it by myself, because all the labels don’t exist any more. Kitty Yo, Mille Plateaux doesn’t exist any more. All the other labels in Berlin where we have contacts –- we haven’t talked to them but it’s obvious that they have their own problems, in a way, because they really don’t know what to release. It’s too risky for them. We are not a rock band, it’s not folk, it’s not techno, it’s not club, it’s not art enough, so we ended up sitting beside jazz.

Do you want to tell us about any new projects you’re working on?

L: We’ve got lots of exciting projects coming up, but the sad [news] is that this is one of our last shows as Rechenzentrum—we’re splitting up!

Rechenzentrum at Mutek 2008 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

The lucky attendees at Mutek’s A/Visions 2 on Thursday experienced sets by Freida Abtan
Németh + Hess, Nokami + Sans Soleil as well as Rechenzentrum’s.

Photos by Andrew Lochhead