I wrote this great post about the beauty of Montreal and how awesome poutine is and I was literally about to post it when the f*cking computer crashed. Do over!

Suffice it to say, I am not in Miami at WMC, and I am not going to make it to Barcelona for Sonar, so I am setting my sights on Mutek.

In its 11th year, Mutek remains one of the most important electronic music festivals in North America. They announced the 2010 lineup today, and it's tasty, including such Percussion Lab favorites as Actress and King Midas Sound.

The full lineup is here.

Hope to see you there, and save us some poutine please!

Amtrak tix to Montreal are $69 each way, and you're on the TRAIN!!! (for 12 hours).

Have you ever had a book you were reading and an album sync up? Kind of like a movie soundtrack, but intensely personal? I read a lot, and it's less common that you might think; I remember reading Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama during the run-up to New Year's Eve 1999-2000 and caning Leftfield's Rhythm and Stealth in a xanax haze (I was also 'living' the life of the main character, hence the pills). The propulsive beats, clean edges and otherworldly production echoed the tension and paranoia of the literary experience in an unforgettable way. Or maybe I was just suffering from pre-millenium tension.

I hadn't really had a significant synced-up lit-music experience since Glamorama until I started reading William Gibson's Spook Country while listening to Burial's Untrue.

Gibson is credited with coining the term 'cyperspace', and with his novel Neuromancer (1984), more or less created the template for sci-fi for the next 20 years. With 2003's Pattern Recognition and 2007's Spook Country, the noted futurist shifted his focus to the contemporary world, exploring the paranoid, claustrophobic aftermath of 9/11 and the Bush years.

Peopled by ex-CIA operatives working in the private sector, an eccentric marketing billionaire obsessed with maintaining his preternatural - and highly profitable - sense of cool, faded pop stars, and a host of 'good-guy' characters struggling against the worst outrages of late-stage capitalism, this series deals with internet memes, brand allergies, and grand practical jokes.

Untrue was a natural accompaniment to my reading of Spook Country. It evoked a dark, twitchy longing that was echoed in the book. Burial's trademark asexual ghost-voices and shuffling beats perfectly matched Gibson's interest in dead technology and shadow conspiracies.

Why am I telling you this? The release date of the third installment of the Pattern Recognition/Spook Country series (he's well known for writing in 3's) has been announced: Zero History hits shelves on September 7, 2010. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping Burial - or someone we've never heard of - drops a new LP to accompany my read.

Can you tell I'm excited?

We've been hard at work on some changes to the site which will hopefully make it more of a pleasure to use. And when we're testing the site, here are some of the sets we've been playing...

Brendon Moeller - Nutriot Podcast 05
dub techno, deep house
Nutriot comes through yet again with another podcast of deep beats spanning from disco to dub techno.

Flying Lotus - Live on Future Roots Radio KPFK
warp records, electro, glitch, experimental, funk
Dig this live performance Flying Lotus brought to the airwaves on dublab's “future roots radio” program.

Autechre - 12 Hour Radio Broadcast
warp records, ambiant, techno, hip hop
Not much needs to be said about this endurance testing epic mix. If you missed it, don't sleep.

Sheffield Bleep - Machine Funk
machine funk, sheffield bleep mix
Sheffield Bleep mixes some evil relentless machine funk!

Brandwan - Time Is No Future Mix
dubstep, future garage
One of the better selection of that whatchoocallit bass music permeating through london and new york right now.

Krts - Remixes for Beards and Flannels
new york, hip hop, electro, wobble
This is a 6th floor apartment walk-thru type mix. Gets rugged and smooth courtesy of Krts.

Kate Simko
Lost In Time EP
Eklo

Words by Carl Ritger

It’s easy to get caught up in the details when speaking about Kate Simko. Yes, she is a woman playing – and most definitely succeeding – in a generally male-dominated scene. Yes, she is a classically trained pianist who discovered electronic music and saw the veritable light. Looking past the back-story can be equally difficult for both critics and listeners, but at the end of the day it’s Simko’s music that needs to speak for itself. At her best, Simko manages to occupy a fine balance between the sort of creeping minimal techno that Richie Hawtin refined with his revered output under the Plastikman moniker and the fuzzy, blissed out tech house of vintage Kompakt. Unfortunately, her latest 12" for the Paris-based Eklo imprint, Lost In Time, simply fails to raise the bar Simko has set for herself.

After charging onto the scene in 2008 with the release of the nearly flawless She Said EP on Spectral Sound, Simko quickly followed up with a flurry of similarly excellent singles, but quality control is an elusive and fickle beast. Thankfully Lost In Time doesn’t miss the mark entirely, it’s more like two steps sideways and a little shuffle to the back. The eponymous a-side cut is a rather by-the-numbers Simko jam. All of the rhythmic elements are in place, but she fails to inject it with enough funk to really get it off the ground, instead opting to cycle through a few different patterns and using the atmospherics in the background to draw the listener in. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s hardly her finest moment, and the dOP mix on the flip doesn’t do much to invigorate it.

Thankfully, "Pastis," buried at the end of the b-side, steals the show. Simko bumps the BPM up ever so slightly, but it does wonders for the track. From a purely rhythmic perspective, "Pastis" is beautifully programmed, with a flurry of hand percussion cycling above a restrained house template; but what really sets this cut a couple notches above the a-side is the fact that Simko beefs up the arrangement with a pronounced melodic element, centering the hook around a simple – yet deadly effective – chord progression that nods to both Simko’s Chicago heritage and her well-documented love of South American music. Here’s to hoping Simko can pull a few tracks like "Pastis" out of her sleeve for the next EP.