This year, Mutek celebrates 10 great years of showcasing some of the world’s best electronic music and culture. In that time, it has become not only one of Montréal’s most beloved festivals, but one of the premiere events of its kind in the world. It runs from May 27th-31st in some of the cities’ most interesting venues- check www.mutek.org for the full rundown.

I’m a huge fan of this unique event and will have a ton of exclusive tips, picks and profiles on this blog in the coming weeks. To kick it all off, I sat down with Dimitri Nasrallah, the Festival’s Content Manager and International Media Relations whiz. We talked about how the fest began and where it’s going…

Brendan Murphy: So, how did Mutek start?

Dimitri Nasrallah: MUTEK began as an evolution of programming that Alain Mongeau had been doing for the FCMM festival during the late 90s. At the time, FCMM had a live-performance section dedicated musicians using new technology to experiment with music. By 2000, MUTEK was an independent festival platform for these live performances.

BM: What was the first year like? Did you have any idea that it would get this huge?

DN: The first year of MUTEK was a modest affair, attracting approximately 2000 people. The venues back then were lot smaller, and the festival took place primarily at Ex-Centris, Laika, and Cafe Campus. 34 artists performed that year. The staff was small, but then again, the staff is still relatively small compared to other festivals. I think there was always the idea of that first seed germinating in place – it grew a lot more organically than any kind of long-term planning could have predicted. By 2003, MUTEK had launched a second festival in Mexico City, and by 2004 there was a version of the festival in Chile. All the while the Montréal version grew and grew, and began to attract a lot of attention across North America for being a unique event.

BM: What is it about Montréal that made it a perfect home for this sort of music?

DN: Well, in the first years, there was a very vibrant homegrown scene of producers who supported the festival and who the festival, in turn, promoted to wider audiences. Certainly the city takes its cultural events seriously and there is financial support here for events of this nature that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere. On the other hand, Montréal has always been seen as a cultural gateway between Europe and the rest of North America – that has a lot to do with the unique mix of French and English cultures living side by side. Electronic music has historically seen greater acceptance in Europe, and a bit of that has always filtered back to Montréal. So MUTEK managed to capitalize on the timing of the cultural boom in serious techno around the turn of the century, and things just went from there.

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