Robot Lab's Juke Bots lost their battle. Scanner and Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1966) were a winning combo.

Friday evening began with a public lecture delivered by Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, who discussed his working method both with regards to his general output and specifically his recent live project re-scoring Jean-Luc Godard's seminal futuristic pulp caper Alphaville (1965). While interesting in its own right, the brief appearance was an ideal primer for Saturday night's free event featuring Rimbaud's live interpretation / performance of Alphaville's soundtrack. The DVD launch party for local multimedia collective EpsilonLab followed Rimbaud's talk and featured excerpts from the compilation of eleven musicians and eleven VJs. EpsilonLab parties here in Montreal are an intense hybrid of cutting edge electronic music and live video projection / manipulation; while it seems unlikely that you'd want to recreate the atmosphere of EpsilonLab's legendary events in the confines of your own home, the DVD is nonetheless a brilliant document of the collective's equally brilliant work.

On Saturday, a packed house timidly sipped their beers and smoked their cigarettes, awaiting the start of the decidedly postmodern presentation of one of cinema's greatest (and most irreverent) postmodern experiments. To say Rimbaud's digital trickery created something entirely new out of Godard's decidedly dated sci-fi soundtrack would be an understatement. Filling voids with all sorts of washed effects and creating silences where characters and their diegetic environment once dominated the soundtrack, Rimbaud re-expressed the film's emotional tendencies without damaging the weight they originally carried. At times, entirely new rhythm tracks and cliq-hop beats dominated the stereo field, re-invigorating the Alphaville experience. The killing spree / foot race / car chase towards the film's conclusion was given an entirely new life as Rimbaud laid out a pounding, digi-distorted rhthym track that pushed the sequence towards its fucked up conclusion. As the original meaning of Godard's obscured narrative concerning a spy's search for the creator of a Fascist supercomputer called Alpha 60 is ambiguous at best, Rimbaud's performance took full advantage of the play he was allowed in terms of making the film's sound elements his own -- it was a unique and unforgettable moviegoing experience.

After a brief intermission, all eyes turned toward Usine C's Studio room for the much anticipated "battle" between Robot Lab's Juke Bots and Montreal's very own A-Trak. Having told every living soul I encountered in the city about this event prior to Saturday night, I almost felt personally responsible for its success as a spectacle. In the end, however, the whole idea of these two pre-programmed robots was too good to be true.

The robots are described as having the ability to "slow, fragment and distort music" with amazing precision "according to their moods and whims", so I was expecting nothing less than the Transformers cum the Ninja Tune crew to be unveiled before my teary, techie eyes. Sadly, all I got was a couple of assembly line robot-arms with the less than stellar ability to spin and scratch vinyl in pre-defined and ultimately unmusical patterns. Imagine the sound you made on you parents' record player in elementary school, or the first (and last?) time you foolishly tried to emulate Terminator X or Jazzy Jeff on the family's Sears-brand turntable. This is basically the racket the Juke Bots were capable of -- utterly disappointing. What started out as a crazed muso-robotic fantasy was in fact a publicist's wet dream: a room full of people packed to the rafters because of the deft creative writing ability that produced a press release of pure fiction.

Luckily (for both the audience and the on-the-hook festival programmers), turntablist magician A-Trak stepped up to the decks and produced a thirty minute set of the most spectacular scratching and sampling this audience member has ever seen. Taking cuts from big-beat records, guitar licks from swampy Southern rock and synth-lines from old-school techno, A-Trak offered up layer after layer of sound en route to completely obscuring the source material and exploring unmapped sonic territory. Kraftwerk, De La Soul and Missy Elliot were just a few of the barrelful of recognizable tracks A-Trak used to create his turntable symphonies. And this was precisely what made the set so entertaining and engaging: the audience, familiar with the albums being cut-up and reassembled, had something to hang onto and cheer for, whereas the Juke Bots distanced everyone in attendance with their cold automatism, underscored by the unrecognizable "grooves" they were attempting to deliver. At the end of the performance, the modest A-Trak patted the Juke Bots on the back for a job well done during their brief set of simultaneous scratching. Really, though, it was A-Trak who had to dumb it down for the sake of the two displaced drones, and the two machines were put firmly in their place by the unmatched skill and vision of one of the world's foremost (and youngest -- 20 years old) DJ celebrities.

With the after-party headlined by the US-based DJs Saeed and Palash -- and make no mistake about it, A-Trak had the crowd charged and everyone spilled back into the main room where the evening's true showcase was about to begin -- Elektra wrapped things up in grand fashion. No one in attendance was having anything less than a stellar time and most were already theorizing on which big names would be in attendance next year. Will you be there?

Article by Mike Baker

Did you miss Mike's write-up of weekend one of Elektra? Read it here.