Sónar. 15^th Barcelona International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art

June 19 -21, 2008
Festival website: http://www.sonar.es/portal/eng/home.cfm.

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann

yvonne.spielmann@uws.ac.uk


Over past years, the festival events of Sónar have gained international reputation of presenting latest trends and cutting-edge developments in electronic music and audio-visual experimentation. The festival attracts artists, musicians, producers, critics and club-goers from around the world who enjoy the southern, very relaxed atmosphere of a festival that benefits from a large number of open air events during daytime and partying from late night to next morning. Unfortunately, the night events are still located in a huge convention complex of the remote industrial area and arrival and departure needs to be planned well ahead. Not surprisingly, the festival's transportation system to this night venue collapses once in a while, and it might be tricky to return by taxi. Quite in contrast to the day events where it's almost natural to immerse into the energetically dancing and listening crowd, it is rather a challlenge to create the vibrating atmosphere of a festival in these big, functional halls at night.

Like usually, this year's festival comprises DJ sets and live performances in the day and night programme on three to four stages in parallel, plus the ambitious thematically focussed exhibition of installations and performances around "Light and Sound" in the Centre d'Art Santa Monica and finally the much larger exhibiton of multimedia works of divergent quality in the main venue. Here showcases of rather modest forms of interactivity and animation that are staged for delight and entertainment largely dominate. Except Julian Maire's technological adaption of the Laterna-magica-principle where he sets hand-built and computer animated frames in motion through modified light projection systems. The point is that each "frame" is constructed of various levels of imagery that become visible in time through shifting the lens focus during projection. In addition, the "frames" contain parts of mechnical and/or computer animated movements that are set in motion in conjunction with some live manipulation of liquid parts where 'rain' is pouring or a 'soup' is eaten. In result, with the projection of one frame at a time, Maire manages each individual frame to tell a "story" of movement and change. This cinema inspired work entitled "Demi-Pas" - which has been shown around the world - in the context of Sonar once more holds a mediating position in-between cinematic and digitial machines.

In view of Sónar’s overriding theme, the multimedia works around the future of cinema were meagerly represented or rather addressed the issue in plain one-dimensionality such as Takashi Kawashima in a shadow puppet performance. Here, actual movements of the puppets - which can be seen at front and also from behind the screen where the artists positions the figures on the frame - are simply implemented into video projection of scenic environments. Even Alvaro Cassinelli who in previous work had demonstrated astonishing effects of figurative distortion on elastic screen, in his recent work "Boxed-Ego" at Sónar does not go beyond fundamental effects of stereoscopic views wherein the viewer seems himself/herself as image captured inside the box s/he looks into. Other sections of the theme "Future Cinema" had scheduled screenings of music and video clips in a movie theater with no recognizable common denominator. Fixed screening times for individual film unhappily overlapped with the audio/music performances of the day programme.

In walking distance to the main festival venue, the Museum of Contemporary Art and its surrounding yards (by the way a white in white building that was construced by architect Richard Meyer), the light and sound exhibition at the Art Center Santa Monica showed a plastic cube with blinking blue LEDs signals that were also transmitted auditively. The tag informed this ws the latest conception of Canadian minimial DJ Ritchie Hawtin who also performed with his label MINUS at night. Clearly, the highly talented audio artist has reached world class, but the audiovisual cube falls behind and was only a mysterious Grail to the supporters. Differently, the ground floor installation by Mark Fell from UK had eight strong LED lighting bars rails that were laid in a circle on the floor synchronised with sound sources so that the sound and light waves appeared in intervals and changed intensity accordingly. The physical, rather physiological effects were felt at full range in the center of the piece but the sound and light reflection of the piece attracted attention at far distance as well. Here, a synaesthetic experience of sound and light in combination hold on to the leading idea of the exhibition topic in complex modifications.

Sónar for the most part is an audio festival, and this year's focus was on women performers and voices from Africa, both meant to counter underrepresentation. But apart from big names for the opening night, Goldfrapp and Leila, the stress on female vocalists brought a number of young and fashionable hip hop singers to Sonar stages who performed aggressively as advertised and looked out for quick commercial success. Too bad, some like Yo Majesty really had brilliant voices and could be imagined better in a diffferent music style closer to soul than limiting herselves to hip hop. Some disappointment of another kind was noted with the Japanese performances of "Osaka Invasion", roughly noisy and completey disregaring any contact with the audience. Such autism was not appreciated, whereas the presentations of Ninja Tune were frentically welcomed, in particular highlighted by the live performance of Daedelus from US who used open source software for music composition on a specially designed 16 x 16 step custom-built tool "Monome" that functions like a touch-pad and allows direct approach and interaction with the audience. Here, a new tendency emerges that could also be noted at other media festivals. The times for DJs soley focussing on their computer screens without taking much notice of the audience seem to be running out. Direct interaction with the audience is needed more and more and multimedia approaches that work with the audio and visual scores in equal terms are highly appreciated by an audience who wants to hear and see where the sounds and lights come from.

In a way we can sense a revolt against pre-fabricated samples and a growing interest in the liveliness of live-performances. It was also observed that for the time being electronic music and in particular laptop performance seems to have exceeded its peak. The section had shrunk dramatically to a handfull of high class DJs who like Ricardo Villalobos, Ritchie Hawtin, Miss Kittin, Efdemin and others are returning to Sonar but can now be seen and heard plenty of times a year at clubs and festivals almost worldwide. At the other end of the spectrum was the noticeable re-introduction of rock and pop with many mediocre bands and aggressive hip hop/rap sets. What dominated the picture of music performances here also includes world music from Africa which are meant to bring sounds from unheard territory, fresh but not necessarily innovative. In this respect, it would have been more interesting to contextualizn the African and hip hop scenes with films in the cinema programme that actually deal with tribal music, for example the hip hop films "Tribe" from the Philippines and "Divizionz" from Uganda (both shown at Berlin Film Festival this year). Finally, it will be interesting to follow up how these tribal sounds merge with/into mainstream and to watch if electronica finds its way back to Sónar.