- Barcelona's Mira Festival is an audio-visual event that seeks to walk the line between, and find new ways of combining, those two artforms. This was the festival's fourth edition, with several days of free events and workshops preceding the two main nights of music. These two evenings took place at two venues, with an initial segment at Fabra i Coats, a warehouse-sized arts space in the northeast part of the city, followed by a move to the altogether more familiar Razzmatazz club.
Mildly diverting visual art installations were found in various corners of Fabra i Coats, though generally the visual aspects of the main performances were pretty lacking. The dense lasers in Paula Temple's Hybrid A/V Show at Razzmatazz were the notable exception, while her textured jackhammer techno also proved one of the weekend's musical highlights.
Of the performances at Fabra i Coats, Clark's tightly wound, build-and-dissipate live show stood out, as did Luke Vibert's show, which dispensed with challenging high art in favour of a grinning cavalcade of rave classics. A bizarre late-set outing for Dizzee Rascal's "I Luv U" added to the fun if you could get past how jarring it was. Festival favourite Gold Panda turned in a pleasant if very familiar live set, while Evian Christ paired deafening beats with sharp, tingling melodies and shards of hip-hop (notably his own contribution to Kanye West's Yeezus album, "I'm In It") to an end result than was less thrilling than it sounds.
At Razzmatazz, the relentless bass hum of Factory Floor's Saturday live set was another high point, while Jennifer Cardini's closing performance in an unpleasantly crammed side-room made for a mundane and distinctly underwhelming final set. Well-meaning but too often listless and flat, Mira was a passable off-season distraction with one or two memorable moments, but not much more than that.