- The first time I really felt like I was at Sónar was during Autechre's set at Sónar By Day on Thursday evening. Though the Barcelona sun was blazing outside, the cavernous SonarHall was pitch black. I wormed through the room to get a good position in front of the stage, but it occurred to me there wasn't any point—Autechre's "visual show" is the absence of one. Just after the music started, flood lights above the front of the stage exposed Rob Brown and Sean Booth at work behind a pair of PA speakers, but the lights were pointing into the crowd. A beat later, they flicked off, making the room seem even darker. Unaccompanied by a light show or video projection, the music felt cold, abstract and menacing, penetrating yet impenetrable. I wanted to catch another set or two elsewhere, but leaving felt dangerous—I could barely tell where I was in the crowd. Eventually I clawed my way to the exit, and during the journey I realized the crowd must have been close to capacity. The show would have been a hardcore experience at venues half the size of SonarHall, but despite the myriad other musical options, not to mention the near-perfect weather outside, festivalgoers were flocking to total darkness and extreme sounds.
And that, for me, is the essence of Sónar. It's a festival where music from the fringes is given a spotlight, more mainstream bookings come to seem like bold choices, and no matter how weird things get, the crowd is up for the challenge. I sensed a maximalist streak in the programming this year. There was Russell Haswell's intermittently beat-infused noise, which punished a packed house at SonarComplex. There was Vessel, whose live set in SonarHall, verging on post-punk and industrial, was beset by darkly sexual projections. Even theoretically lighter By Day bookings, like Floating Points in SonarDôme and Nick Hook outside at SonarVillage, managed a certain intensity: the former spun as slamming a set as I'd ever heard from him to a packed floor, and the latter's set played like a history of party jams.
The boisterousness continued at Sónar By Night. I entered on Friday to Die Antwoord's live show, whose hyperactive projections, chaotically choreographed backup dancers and screeching vocals were nearly too big for SonarClub, one of the most enormous indoor venues anywhere. I walked straight through to SOPHIE at SonarLab, where the producer's dayglo synthesis and sugar-high songwriting felt comparatively subdued. Randomer was at the helm of SonarCar, a tiny stage in the middle of an impossibly large convention hall, and as you backed away from the soundsystem, his brutal techno turned into a grisly wash of noise. (I might have grabbed a late-night burger from the vendors at the far end of the room, but in the midst of all those shrieking resonances I didn't think I could stomach one.)
Then, of course, came Skrillex, whose drops were accompanied by columns of smoke machine blasts from the front of the stage and projections as loud as the music. I bounced back and forth between that set and Jamie xx's, whose show at SonarPub, ostensibly a showcase for the material and vibe of his new album, felt no less calculated but offered some much-needed breathing room.
If Sónar went extra-large this year, then its comparatively subtle moments made an outsized impact. Evian Christ's live set at SonarHall on Saturday wasn't minimalist in the least, but every moving part had a purpose, from his perfectly chiseled drums to the hypnotically clean lines of Emmanuel Biard's projections. In tempo, impact and overall energy level, it matched Skrillex, but where I could only take that set in five- or ten-minute chunks, at Evian Christ I was glued to the floor. On Friday at SonarComplex, Voices From The Lake built from dreamy ambient textures to a waterfall of lush techno in the space of an hour, prompting a large portion of the crowd to abandon their seats and turn the front-of-house into a writhing dance party.
On Saturday night at SonarPub, FKA twigs, backed by a band pounding away at MIDI controllers, performed my favorite set of the festival—a one-woman audiovisual show, she punctuated perfectly sung notes with otherworldly dance moves. I sensed a connection, however subtle, with my other favorite part of the program this year: ART+COM's RGB | CMI Kinetic installation for the Sónar+D tech showcase, where five mirrored rings, suspended in mid-air by some sort of cable system, moved with alien smoothness across beams of light to create Walter Ruttmann-style shapes on the floor. Set to a moving score by Ólafur Arnalds, the installation was both spectacular and intimate, and I could have sat in the bleachers and watched those rings do their impossible dance all day had there not been so much else at the festival to see.
Maximalism isn't a bad look for Sónar—it sits well with their take-no-prisoners approach to the big festival concept—but it did expose a logistical issue at By Night. While "accredited" attendees can escape the onslaught in one of two VIP bars, paying customers have an all-night program to attend to, with no real chillout zone to take shelter from the music. This feels unfair, especially since By Night's home, the Fira Gran Via L'Hospitalet, is so enormous that it's hard to imagine they couldn't carve one out. With a lineup as strong as the one Sónar put together for 2015, though, you can't imagine anyone would want to spend too much time off the floor; it would merely make the experience of attending Europe's best large-scale electronic music marathon more manageable.
Photo credits: Sónar Festival