The equation looks, once, with all its attributes: social dance between the fairgrounds, a bit of hedonistic hubbub and sound findings with avant-garde vertices. The formula that Sónar coined in 1994 and that, these days, on its 30th anniversary, lady triumphant and inaccessible to aging: As happens with high school teachers, one can add another year to each edition and realize that Sonar is still thereas if nothing, stuck in his eternal youth.
This is how it could be perceived this Thursday at the opening of this anniversary program, very closing of electronic ranks, with its angular ‘sets’ and their adventurous audiovisual constructions. Premiere crowned by Black Coffee, sounded full in the big tent that, this year, occupies the daytime agora of Sónar, the ‘village’, now protected from the sun’s rays. Space through which the, for now, still mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, was seen.
south african echoes
There, the producer and ‘dj’, Nkosinathi Innocent Maphumulo according to his passport, dominated the masses with a muscular pass and exotic strokes, nourished by cadences and ‘sampled’ voices typical of the amapiano, the South African deep house developed a decade ago. At the base of his sonic cathedral, the enveloping ‘grooves’ of his latest album, ‘Subconsciously’. The ‘village’, headquarters of the passing public and the most playful clientelelived hot hours with the house provided by the British couple Bradley Zero b2b Moxie.
In other scenarios, many eyes turned to Oneohtrix Point Neveridentity of the American Daniel Lopatin, who proceeded to remodel his catalog of creations in that kind of deconstructed ‘greatest hits’ entitled ‘Rebuilds’. Purely Electronic Recap Luckstuffed with unpredictable ‘samples’ and loud crackles, with animations and visual nods to the 80s.
Japanese urbanities
In contrast with his digital maneuvers, the furious verb raised by the Japanese (born in London) Tohji, a creature associated with the so-called ‘mall culture’ (or shopping center culture: the Xanadu of a certain girl from her country, and from others). Frankenstein-songs that shred vestiges of quite frenetic Eurobeat and J-pop with urban bases and high-speed phrases. Tohji doesn’t exactly look like a creature of this world. “Actually, I’m not from Japan, but from the ocean,” he let us know before assaulting, as the culmination of the concert, one of his landmarks, ‘Super ocean man’, with a tribal tune, sighs in a ‘loop’ and a minimalist complexion with a trapper .
Pass of concise songs, his, on that day so prone to elusive electronic compositions, experimental or purely danceable. And in that territory some notable female voices moved. Like the Portuguese-Danish Erika de Casier, a suggestive voice, defending her imaginative crossover of electronic pop and r’n’b on a bare bluish stage, propped up on their recent second album‘Sensational’, and with references to previous themes, such as ‘Intimate’.
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Not far away, the abrupt (and political) electro-pop with an ‘arty’ (and ‘punkie’) background from the Belgian couple Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupu. One of the most enjoyable performances of the dayon the back of songs from that album called ‘Tropical dancer‘ (produced by their Soulwax compatriots), purveyors of unpredictable twists and wacky tunes with immediate effect. Pieces with a sense of humorlike ‘Thank you’, a kind of hymn to condescension that the girls from Feria could have signed in another time.
And what to say about the galactic figure of the Catalanby Piera, Marina Herlop, giving another life to the repertoire of her album ‘Prypiat’ (name of the ghost town located near the Chernobyl atomic power station), with its magical and ancestral halo, using a format with transverse flute, percussion and the help of the vocal duo Tarta Relena. Another face of this ‘planet Sónar’ whose image is put up this year by those eccentric, deformed figures with sinister grimaces, in honor of “the beauty of error& rdquor;. Non-normative music and visual arts, after all, taking power on Montjuïc.