Sonar festival, Barcelona

26 June 2015 - Editorial

It began in Barcelon-a a a. The Guardian described it as ‘drilling you with intense electronic beats that sound like parallel universes being ripped apart’. Mixmag as a ‘sense-assaulting three days’.

Well the Spanish do like their fiestas. Think thousands of ear-shattering bangers released in under five minutes. This predates Ibiza and electronic music of course. It’s in their DNA.

This was this reviewer’s second visit. The first, in 2006, resulted in me hardly setting foot inside the venues, something to do with the natural vibrancy of the town, restaurants and lifestyle. This year once more, there was life in the form of unofficial parties outside Sonar’s walls. As ever with successful enterprises, Sonar has spawned an alternative culture of its own; after all if Duran Duran are booked to open Saturday’s night festivities, why wouldn’t they play again in some swish villa in the hills?  Why wouldn’t Richie Hawtin put on a free gig at Europe’s biggest food market La Boqueria? This is Barcelona after all, a city brimming with culture and music.

But Sonar is its own force to be reckoned with. 119,000 attendees over three days and two nights, and now expanding across South America and Scandinavia.

The congress area, in the day venue, was well attended, if a little confusing, with makeshift wooden stages demarcated with wicker fencing. It took some time to work out that I wasn’t in some unrelated backstage. But what a cornucopia it offered for electronic music fans, especially the MarketLab, where creators of the year’s most interesting technologies presented their creations.

This included the opportunity to build one’s own Mute Synth, designed in partnership with electro pioneer Daniel Miller. Arriving late meant building nothing apart from a crick in my neck, as I craned it to hear someone demonstrating the aural benefits of connecting an oscillator to a triangular wave creator, the nerd in me quietly backflipping all the while. But that’s the problem – there’s too much going on. Sonarcelona really needs a week to do it justice. Several minutes later, and I found myself creating a tune with a five year old by moving shapes around a resonance table. We were good. 

The real music was of course a treat. The night venue on its own rivaled Gatwick in size, complete with bouncy rubber walkways transporting happy gig-goers to four thundering bass stages and a central area that resembled Marrakesh’s Djemaa El-Fna square in sheer buzz.

Autechre played in pitch black, creating complex, glitchy noise, sounding more like their most recent album Exai than their previous more ambient body of work. Pure Warp.

Other highlights included Y€$0, Annie Mac, Flying Lotus, The 2 Bears, Sirius & Modeselector, Jamie xx and Duran Duran, who rocked out Grandmaster Flash’s classic White Lines, before finishing with Rio. The Chemical Brothers took a while to warm up, but delivered in the end.

Recommends? Dreamy bass pioneer Cashmere Cat is one to watch. He played a heavy dub set, complete with his classic Mirror Maru.

Hot Chip played twice. A band so comfortable with their sound, they mixed and mashed up their own music with whatever took their fancy, dropping in a few bars here of William Onyeabour, a few bars there of Aly-us’ follow me, and finishing with a snythey take on Springsteen’s Dancing in The Dark. They also performed Huarache Lights, the lead on their latest album ‘Why make Sense’. It contains the lines "Replace us with the things / That do the job better” This neatly touched on an interesting theme of the event, expanded on by Friday’s congress keynote, science fiction and Wired writer Bruce Sterling.

He predicted the ultimate downfall of the today’s empire of internet corporates - Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. He contended that network society has so far failed to live up to the democratic vision that the ‘90s promised, rather the power has been shored up by new moguls, with regular attempts being made to sideline creatives. Sounds familiar.

He described these new majors as all converging on each other, trying to find ways of packaging culture, extending their talons around the creative industries first, and then other industries via the Internet of Things.

Sterling sees this bleak picture continuing for maybe 15 years, with the majors then becoming increasingly less relevant, ultimately predicting we will outlive digital as a technology. He believes we will increasingly look to a post digital world, favouring real culture over anything that can be packaged and sold. Culture that lives in the streets, on the stages and with the artists. 

So all the more appropriate that Sonar’s birthplace was Barcelona. Concluding it’s 22nd edition, the organisers see the mix of shows, congress, installations and human interaction as vital parts of a circle of electronic culture. 

Sonar’s vision aligns with Sterling’s, as it sees the role of technology as an enabler rather than an end in itself.  And despite presenting the best that electronic culture can offer, Sonar remains firmly an offline event; perhaps an ultimate celebration of humanity’s pre-eminence over machines.

 

Sam Shemtob