It pays to be connected

>> The art world meets the club scene, and Montreal meets Germany's Humate, at the Elektra festival

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

One can calculate, extrapolate and guess-timate, but by and large, predicting the future is a game of darts, blindfolded. Here's an example: remember those awful, smiley-faced "acid house" T-shirts that signalled the arrival of rave culture? Hard to believe something so utterly banal would herald not a particularly embarrassing fad, but rather a complete shift in the structure of popular music.

Harder yet to accept that someone who boarded the train at Acid House Station a dozen years ago would find himself hopping off at Avant-Garde Avenue, without transferring once. But with his arrival in town for the Elektra festival, that's what Germany's Gerret Frerichs, better known in the world of techno as Humate, has done.

"Naturally, when you're young, expectations are very high," says Frerichs, looking back at his own early involvement with acid house. "Not everything I wanted to happen actually happened, but I'm quite happy with the way things turned out."

He should be. He's a star attraction for the Superstition label, one of the preeminent purveyors of techno in Germany, itself a preeminent purveyor of techno. While Frerichs has worked under a variety of aliases since the days of "ah-ceeeeeed," the one that's stuck is Humate.

Very superstitious

Originally a production duo, Humate was based in the small city of Oldenburg, where Frerichs and partner P. Kjonberg tinkered away at such early techno hits as "Love Stimulation" for the MFS label.

"Kjonberg and I split a couple of years ago, but I must say, many of the early tracks wouldn't have turned out the way they did if he wouldn't have been there. In 1993 I got very frustrated with MFS Records in Berlin, and I decided to look for a new label. Fortunately I met Tobias Lampe at the right time."

That's Tobias Lampe of Superstition, who convinced Frerichs to relocate to the far more happening milieu of Hamburg. It was Lampe who then hooked Frerichs up with some sweet remix gigs for the likes of Human League, Yello and old-school electronic soundscaper Klaus Schulze. "Generally, doing remixes is a pleasant occupation, since you don't have to come up with tons of ideas. For me, though, it was very exciting to work on material from some of the heroes of my youth."

Like he said, he's happy how things worked out. "The most exciting aspect of club culture is definitely globalization. There's nothing more exciting than knowing somebody thousands of miles away has access to my music. Hong Kong in particular I like very much--my whole stay in the city was a buzz and the audience there is brilliant. I love exchanging emotions on a musical level with cultures very different from my own."

Frerichs will find himself amid a culture very different from the raves and parties he's used to next Friday, September 15. "To be honest, Elektra is the only event of its kind. Especially in the German scene, I can't see any fusion like this. Even worse, it seems that the artistic scenes have no interest in interacting with each other."

Putting the "art" in "party"

Mad props, then, to the organizers of Elektra. The festival, which began back on August 18 and has already seen visits from John Acquaviva, Richie Hawtin and the U.K.'s Slacker, is a rather ambitious undertaking. The idea, on paper (or whatever digital-age equivalent you subscribe to), seems simple enough: to provide a forum, a meeting place, for the avant-garde of the electronic arts on one hand and the carefree bodyrockin' of the clubland kids on the other. The choice of venues illustrates the point--most of Elektra goes down at noted art-space Usine C, but they're not above hustling the party over to Sona.

The festival is the brainchild of Alain Thibault, artistic director of ACREQ, Quebec's electroacoustic association. Traditionally, this group is a lightning rod for out-there experimental music, created or at least processed electronically. It's sit-down, think-about-it stuff, generally, but Thibault's leading the move towards the pop-culture possibilities beckoning from clubland--both in his structuring of Elektra and in his own music (his most recent release, launched at Elektra's opening, is on local techno label Ascend, which should tell you something).

Each night of the fest is broken into two segments. The evening portion, which begins each night at 9, is the "serious" part. An international spread of installation and performance artists, focusing on sound manipulation and video technology, bring on the edifying abstracts. After a couple of hours, just as the crowd starts getting all fidgety, the gears shift, the DJ hits the decks and the far more populist side of electronic expression takes over--let the boogie-down begin.

Singing the body electric

The artists involved with the first facet of Elektra require some explanation. For instance, there's Austria's Granular Synthesis, who repeat last year's visit to Elektra's debut season. On the theoretical side, the works of Viennese duo Kurt Hentschlaeger and Ulf Langheinrich (including Areal A, making its North American debut here on Friday, September 8) are about the repositioning of our physical and psychological selves in this technologically dominated "brave new world." Equally attracted and repelled by the pervasiveness of the artificial and the inorganic, the duo illustrate their concerns in a dramatic fashion, coupling hypnotic, oversized video loops of physical bodies with barrages of subbass rumble heavy enough to throw your physical body for a loop.

Then there's Japan's Ryoji Ikeda and the Dumb Type collective, straight outta placid Kyoto. Ikeda builds sonic atmospheres out of tones and pulses, while the members of Dumb Type employ lighting, theatre and installation in their performance events. Their activist sensibility, particularly concerning AIDS, flies in the face of modern Japanese theatre, which avoids politics like the plague.

From closer to home comes Vancouver-based Paul Dolden, an established figure in the electroacoustic scene. He's interesting in that he uses classical instruments such as cello and violin, only processed and layered to generate a carefully controlled cacophony. Equally Canadian are our city's own [The User], for whom Elektra is the latest avenue for their ongoing Silophone project. The Silophone is in fact a grand but disused grain silo in the Old Port which is blessed with amazing natural acoustics, sustaining reverberations up to 20 seconds. It's been rigged for sound, which contributors to the project beam in via phone, Internet or on-site mics. The acoustics do their thing, and the results are recorded and even broadcast live to remote locations (such as, oh, Usine C). In other words, an echo of an echo, which becomes a new sound in and of itself.

Everybody dance now

That's the heavy stuff. When your brain starts to hurt and your feet start to itch, that means it's time to trot out the DJs. Friday, September 8 sees a visit to Usine C by prominent trance figure G. O. Brien, who's joined by vid-jockey Yan Breuleux on the visual side. The following night has Philgood and Turbo's Tiga (with Parano's Cinétik on visuals) doing their Elektro '80 thing. Everybody do the robot! Or the running man. It's up to you.

Further down the road, on September 16, Yaz and Nivoc of the Ascend label bust out the cosmic techno for the closing of Elektra. But the centrepiece of the whole thing is Humate, whose visit coincides with the world avant-premiere of the Superstition 2001 compilation. Not to brag or anything, but we're getting a crack at this thing months ahead of everyone else. Pays to be connected, dig.

Since we're back to Humate, might as well find out what he's got cooking on his end. "Right now I'm working on my album," he says, "which is eagerly awaited by the Superstition staff. I hope to finish it by then end of year. From there on I'd like to get well known enough to be able to give Traci Lords a call and ask her out for dinner!"

Better yet, Mr. Frerichs--ask her out to an abstract, avant-garde multimedia art installation. That'll score you points.

Elektra coninues at Usine C and Sona until Sept. 16. Check listings for details