This year there is no Dream a pop attraction for all audiences, along last last either Pet Shop Boys (groups that paraded in other editions), but it has gradually become clear that the festival doesn’t need them, that it can fortify itself without any hassle around its own brand and a display of figures coming, to a large extent, from the most nuclear electronica. And so, an artist surely alien to the general public, such as Aphex Twin, great techno guru (and surroundings), and a walking encyclopedia, sees himself taming the masses, like a stadium rock star, in atomic ‘sets’ like the one he offered this Friday at the Fira Gran Via L’Hospitalet venue, opening the nocturnal plot of this 30th Sónar.
Abundant public, occupying all the stages, on this second day of the festival (waiting for the attendance figures to be released this Saturday). And a fetish name of the fans, Aphex Twin, the alias of the British Richard David James, reminding us that he has been in this (professionally) for as many years as Sónar (two more, to be precise). That was what his overwhelming ‘show’ was about, reviewing, in machine gun mode and with a wide margin for improvisation, his contributions to electronic music since the times of his baptismal and highly influential ‘Selected ambient works 85-92’ (launched in 1992 and that collected themes created when he was 14 years old) up to the present.
the psychedelic cube
Imperative session, with initial detonations that warned us of the little dialogue journey that was to come. Aphex Twin made the concert a ‘rave’ with which not to leave a puppet at the cost of the most invasive techno texture and the most spectacular invocation of the classic IDM, with perfectly assembled breakbeat passages, drum’n’bass whims, industrial offshoots… The artist, operating from a cubicle-cage, under a huge cube turned into a psychedelic audiovisual artifact. Theirs is supposed to be intelligent or cerebral dance music, but at Sónar it was above all a coven, a physical celebration for the greater glory of that iconic logo, the abstract A that can suggest so many meanings.
Before the cathartic rite of Aphex Twin, in the daytime slots, the ‘village’ of Fira Montjuïc hosted, as usual, the most extroverted and/or lightest sessions of the day, and there it took the cake The Blessed Madonna, with his infectious mix of techno, house and other spices. And with their sense of the show: a troupe of go-go dancers, dancers and mountebanks worthy of the LGTBI Pride parade, all under the motto ‘we still believe’. and a tribute to Laurent Garnier (who was supposed to perform this Saturday and suspended the tour for health reasons) with one of his milestones, ‘The man with the red face’.
voice in the shadows
Located at the antipodes of so much hubbub, the pass of the Barcelona duo Desert, with that kind of digital folk, or electronic with specters of popular song, vaporous and with abrupt contrasts, which he has been developing for a decade now, although his most decisive works are his recent ones (the album ‘Caos sota el cel’, 2022). Insinuating voice and elusive staging, that of Cristina Checacrouching on the ground and melting into the shadows to sing, as the finale of the pass, a heartfelt adaptation of ‘Me n’aniré de casa’, one of the very first compositions by Maria del Mar Bonet.
But Sónar always brings a dance of extremes, and there, the most challenging (and hurtful) experience for the senses was that of the Japanese Ryoji Ikeda, without mercy in the handling of his ‘ultratronics’ (this is the title of his 2022 album). Something like an evolution of the aesthetic of technological error (the ‘glitch’) based on the unfriendly idea of mercilessly triggering all kinds of crackles, industrial noises and thick bass with a robotic audiovisual support.
Electronic experimentation, less criminal, was also manifested with Lorenzo Senni and that inclination of his to create a kind of trance without trance, a disruptive and non-epic hypnotic state. Similar to the purposes of her remembered ‘Rave voyeur’, a song in which she presented herself as a ‘rave’ tourist and which saw the light through the front door: the Warp label. Other mentionable performances: love satur with his fast-paced ‘cyberdelia’ (and his Whitney Houston ‘samples’) and the 3D show by that computational biologist named Max Cooper, with macro images (of the cosmos) and micro (protozoa) wrapped in music with traces of 20th century minimalism. Let’s get air. Sónar culminates its loaded 30th edition this Saturday.
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