Sónar always celebrates its party, whether it is its 30th anniversary or not like this year, in the afterlife. The advanced music festival brings together creatures bewitched by sound, multiple varied electronic melodies that are followed every year by hundreds of thousands of faithful who fill the event. But here, at Sónar, it often happens that the image is as important and attractive as the songs themselves, coming to form a mesmerizing ensemble. On its closing night, the festival featured a witchcraft spectacle loaded with potions from the future, even though it took place in the most radiant present and in front of the thousands of people who crossed into another dimension tonight with their feet on the ground of the Gran Via Fair. The Swedish ‘dj’ Eric Prydz has presented one of the most cutting-edge shows as of June 2023. An unimaginable future that is real. ‘Holo’ (from hologram), something like what virtual reality glasses promised, but, importantly, without virtual reality glasses.
An immense installation of screens created to mix with the progressive house of the Swedish creatures that protrude from them or an articulated robotic arm that holds a mobile that interacts with the public at the beginning of the three-dimensional ‘show’. And games of light and lasers achieve, for example, a rain effect that accompanies an almost palpable electrical storm inside the crowded Fira. Giant holograms that move and execute the movements directed from an altar in the shadows by Eric Prydz, author of the legendary ‘Opus’ and, now also, father of the party in the unknown dimension.
everyone’s land
Sónar has undoubtedly established itself as the ideal space for shows that remain in no man’s land (or in everyone’s land), those that seem like something difficult to define, at least in a few words. The duo formed by the Igualadino musician Carles Viarnès and the Madrid visual artist Alba G. Corral is comfortable at the festival, a couple of exquisite harmony in which there is no gap in sight. They presented the pianist’s album ‘Hyper_O’ during the day, impregnated with Gregorian melodies spit out precisely by a strange instrument called a hyperorgan that Viarnès controls digitally, leaving the piano in a second line, and which allows him to do things that would be impossible in the traditional way . Corral, several meters from the pianist but far from his air, adjusts the images that are projected on a large screen that rules the auditorium stage. A spectacle that the visual elevates to a seductive unknown paradise, like the hyperorgan itself.
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In unorthodox terrain, two of the most interesting rappers on the Spanish scene who programmed at the festival also move. Leïti Sène from Barcelona has always been willing to explore. Wearing a white mask, sweaty but comfortable with an audience that included his partner, his baby and his mother, he flaunted his extensive flow through much of his “Apocalypse” album. In a brief time jump, an hour later on the same stage, Leïti burst in to sing a song at the concert of the second transcendental rapper of the afternoon, that kid who paved the way with C. Tangana in the Agorazein collective, Sticky MA, determined to open another dimension in rap. He traveled through it on the back of some of his best songs from ‘Corazón verde’ and the great ‘5ta Dimensión’. A green world that, if it were up to him, not many people would enter, little lover of crowds except if it is at a concert.
The masses feel wonderful to 2manydjs, wizards of the final rampage on the main stage of the daytime part and who announced their arrival with ‘Bizcochito’, by Rosalía. But not only the irresistible triumphed, the Latin scene also rode with names like Nick León or Flaca, the Argentine dj based in Donosti who has done her last gig at Sónar in Barcelona as she has said that she is leaving it, saturated with the rhythms of the world of the music. An indispensable figure in making the club a safe space for everyone, he mixed current Latin hymns -Bad Gyal, one of the queens of the closing dawn, sounded to the delirium of a public thirsty for perreo- with others such as ‘Hip’s don’t lie’. Because, indeed, the hips did not lie. Nor in the Sónar of the other and the thousand dimensions.