All this week, I’ll be talking about the artists and events at Montreal’s MUTEK audiovisual festival. There’s nowhere better to begin than at the launch evening of their a/visions series.

Natural landscapes are recurrent themes in electronic music and the metaphors we use to describe them – glaciers and jetstreams. But the Black Forest of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS, the audiovisual “experience” from the Cologne electronic legend, is an unusually potent descriptor. It’s not so much the real Black Forest’s twigs or leaves or babbling brooks that defines GAS; it’s its density. From its elaborate twirling visual forestry to the saturated sound, GAS is ambient without ever being static, and as deeply enevloping of its visitors as its subject matter.

Every time Bjork drifts in a musical direction you don’t love, just wait. Her latest collaboration, Earth Intruders, with Timbaland producing, sounds utterly fantastic. Listen closely, and it’s also deeply disturbing, a bit like the violent lyrics of the early-century Italian Futurists (check them out if you don’t know them), but set in a terrifying, real now. Timbaland aside (and the crisp combinations of synths and drums might redeem him if you’re still mad about that chiptune thing), Bjork’s vocal performance is center-stage.

All of this bodes well for the new album coming this summer. More press coverage and links on the single:
bjork.com news

The artist is also playing Coachella this year, and in honor of that, Michael Todd takes us on a flashback to a BBC special from 1997 called Modern Minimalists. Bjork makes an impassioned plea for embracing simplicity in favor of intellectual complexity and maximalism, flanked by minimalists from Estonia, Scotland, and Finland (including none other than Arvo Part) as a glass harmonica plays in the background.

It’s good creative/inspirational fuel, and wonderful to have an advocate and unusual personality in Bjork fighting musical blandness. Oh, and Maestro Part fittingly enough looks like as ever like an Orthodox religious icon: