In August 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, the operating system that changed everything: software that reshaped the way we interact with technology. Just over a year earlier, on Friday June 2, 1994, the first day of Sónar was held in Barcelona, ​​a festival that has functioned as the operating system –the software– for the development of culture and digital creativity and the electronic music in Europe. It was by no means the first European festival of advanced music and technological inspiration, but it was the first to have such a great impact on the projection of a city, Barcelona, ​​and it meant the media awakening of a culture that until then had moved and disseminated in minority contexts.
The festival – launched by its still co-directors Enric Palau, Ricard Robles and Sergi Caballero – celebrates its 30th anniversary having helped to consolidate the inexhaustible paradigm of contemporary music: Sónar manages any idea, genre or trend and projects them within a framework of Vanguard. The event reaffirms the intention of reflecting “the present and the future of digital culture and electronic music”, confirm those responsible for the festival; And for this, in this edition they re-examine their DNA with a tribute to club culture, to the figure of the DJ and, of course, to technology-based music.
Perpetrated at the height of the rave phenomenon in Europe, the hangover of the bakalao route, the incipient peripheral pride of the makina and the reduced redoubt of the Barcelona avant-garde of the late eighties, in Sónar’s genetic information the idea of elevate and celebrate the culture of dance, in its broadest and most uninhibited sense. In the first editions of the festival, still tinged with the cybernetic aesthetics that prevailed in the imaginary of the time, all the tribes, subcultures and destitute music lovers who until then gravitated around a network of discotheques that had fallen into disrepair, gathered. There was no unifying element or a music industry around electronics. Sónar endowed meaning, sensitivity and color to a music that helped to illuminate a culture, the digital one.
Linked to the exponential growth of the Barcelona brand, the festival and the city broke the rules of the game, related electronic music to the environment –the CCCB, until 2013– and brought styles such as techno, house and music out of the underground. experimental, until that moment never well pondered by the local public. Thus, the organization of the festival, Advanced Music, built a global audience, which pursues the experience that the edition that begins next Thursday offers in the form of a tribute and revision of its stylistic essence. To which he adds the content of Sónar D, the great recent revolution of the festival, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary, and in which he introduces the essential reading on the impact that technology has had on creativity and culture. Sónar D has provided new meanings to the festival and has redoubled the interest of the event as a point of undoubted cultural interest.
The cultural, ethical, economic and industrial implications of the new tools and creative processes linked to Artificial Intelligence will be addressed. The recurring debate that has been opened with the irruption of generative AI, the protection of intellectual property, the possible threats of the use of this technology or the question of how AI is applied in musical and audiovisual production. At this point, Sónar once again functions as software that manages the Amazonian thematic flow implicit in the intellectual transformation that technology has caused, the hyperconnected and uncertain environment, which has placed us in a permanent, unstable and insecure state of crisis, they say The experts.
In this line, the program of debates and talks is expanded towards another thematic axis, the climate emergency. Here it is a matter of contributing the perspective of different artistic communities in the face of the challenge posed by the stubborn reality of the planet. There will also be space for new technological musical narratives in the form of the characteristic reflection on experimentation, which has defined the vis less hedonistic of Sónar.
The claim, however, always appears in the form of a great event, a spectacle sewn with emotional impact; or festive flourish. This is how electronic music has evolved, now yes, for the masses, and for what its audience has grown exponentially. Unlike other massive commercial label events, Sónar continues to bet on names that we will remember ten years from now. Something that, it must be said, has not always happened. In the long-gaze bet, Aphex Twin stands out, who had not set foot on the noble stage of the festival for eleven years; and four that did not play live. Richard D. James, the most elusive guy in the universe of music that matters, returns accompanied by a solid audiovisual show and all that idiosyncratic intelligence that he applies to both dance and thoughtful reflection.
The unrepeatable electronic pop of the Swedish Fever Ray, with her own language –there is no other like her–, the poetic expertise of Little Simz, winner of the prestigious Mercury Prize; or Oneohtrix Point Never –composer Daniel Lopatin–, who with nostalgic bits of pop, cultural recycling and an overwhelming aesthetic sense has built some of the best electronic records of the last decade. The structured noise of Ryoji Ikeda, the minimal techno of Richie Hawtin, the bassmusic of Kode9 or the DJs Peggy Gou, Honey Dijon or The Blessed Madonna, who masterfully surf between house, revision of disco music and techno, form part of the transcendent fee.
Another headliner claim is the immersive show HOLO by Swede Eric Prydz. It is preceded by an aura of a great event, by the audiovisual forcefulness, but the musical proposal is far from being memorable. The Irish BÃcep, who mixes all the rhythms that have been and will be in the TikTok universe and beyond, will also present credentials in a festival that would not have given them such prominence in past times.
The local micro-scenes, the new arrangement of Sónar by Day, with what, they say, is the best programming in the history of the Village stage, with 2ManyDj’s together with Tiga and the South African dj Black Coffe; or the Complex stage with proposals as relevant as that of Lucrecia Dalt, among many others, place Sónar once again among the best manifestations of global digital culture.
