IMG_7867.jpg
GS

A biohacker, a futurist, and a technologist all walk into a room. The setup to a bad Silicon Valley joke? I wish. In 21st century navelgazing San Francisco, it’s par for the course.

“Where are we at this moment in the history of human creativity and technology?” a moderator asked the trio of tech visionaries in the California Academy of Sciences, while upstairs Kiwi musician Jesse Woolston and French visual artist Joanie Lemercier enthralled audiences in the planetarium with stunning audio-visual performances exploring the natural world in black and white awash with ambient sound.

I could do without the ponderous panel, but the shows—the planetarium plus two others in the science center’s soaring piazza and alongside an aquarium—were mesmerizing. This, I thought, is way cooler than the Pacific Science Center’s Laser Dome.

And the Thursday night museum takeover was just the first taste of MUTEK, a three-day extravaganza for people like me who enjoy spending time in dark rooms listening to esoteric electronic music synced to abstract and artsy visual projections.

MUTEK started in Montréal nearly 20 years ago and was the direct inspiration for Seattle’s very own internationally-renown Decibel (RIP). It felt like a reverse pilgrimage of sorts to attend MUTEK’s first U.S. edition last weekend in San Francisco—so often Seattle is seen as following in SF’s footsteps, but in this case, they are picking up where we left off.

While Seattle’s underground electronic music scene has continued to thrive in Decibel’s absence, the annual public showcase of an event like Decibel was vital in putting Seattle on the map as something more than an indie rock town with a fading grunge legacy. I went to San Francisco wondering what lessons we might learn.

As I wandered from venue to venue through hypergentrified San Francisco, trying to avoid $90 haircuts, runaway electric scooters, and a homelessness crisis to rival our own, the fact that MUTEK landed in San Francisco felt both natural and overdue. Of course a festival billing itself as a home for “digital creativity” would find a home in the world capital of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

And with tech philanthropy partially subsidizing the non-profit behind the event—the challenging art behind MUTEK leans far more non-commercial than EDM festival cash cows—it seems like the Bay Area’s creative scene got at least one small fringe benefit from an economic makeover that has made the region impossibly unaffordable. (Not that the excitement of the former is in any way worth the pain of the latter.)

“MUTEK is an acknowledgment of our cultural richness,” Oakland producer Russell E.L. Butler, a survivor of the Ghost Ship fire, told me. “A lot of the global conversation about the San Francisco Bay Area is expense and artists being pushed out, but we still have this incredible, vibrant scene with a measure of self-sufficiency.”

A lot of the local conversation in Seattle is about the same thing, yet creative types continue to grind it out 365 days a year in the Emerald City. While MUTEK billed German techno pioneer Moritz Von Oswald’s performance as his North American premiere, the ace promoters behind Kremwerk’s Research nabbed him the night before he closed out MUTEK’s Friday night festivities. And Butler, one of the Bay Area’s rising stars, headlined last year’s TUFFEST, one of the many worthy successors to Decibel, albeit a DIY undertaking that by choice isn’t designed to become a destination festival.

Could Decibel 2.0 thrive in the new Seattle flush with tech cash? Dearly departed (as in moved to LA, not dead) Decibel founder Sean Horton found local philanthropy to be stingy. It’s a damn shame, because we have clubs and theatres that can go toe-to-toe with the MUTEK.SF venues, though I admit nothing quite like the abandoned San Francisco Mint turned surreal event space. (The Georgetown Steam Plant might come close.)

Of course, we’re less than a month away from tech money’s biggest contribution to Seattle music: Upstream year two, financed by Paul Allen. One of my favorite MUTEK.SF performers, Equiknoxx, is on the bill. But with headliners that could have been culled from any left-of-center music festival of the last decade—The Flaming Lips? Cut Copy?—I fear Upstream may already be ossifying into just-another-festival and not the North by Northwest wellspring of PNW music that it could be.