BARCELONA — Sónar 2014, Spain's annual electronic music mashup takes Barcelona by storm. In the years since it kicked off in 1994, the International Festival of Advanced Music and New Media Art has earned a top-notch reputation as as one of the world's leading festivals with its pulse on the electronic music scene and the latest in multimedia creation. Sónar's organizers pride themselves on sticking to the festival's founding values: the link between creativity and technology.
In its 21st year, Sónar is quite the cool international scene. BlouinARTINFO checked out cutting-edge performances by Massive Attack, Plastikman, Carsten Nicolai, Jessy Lanza, Ben Frost, Bernier + Messier, Röyksopp & Robyn, Tarek Atouli, Henry Saiz, and many more. Barcelona is the perfect setting for the festival. It's a very sophisticated city that seems to "gets the global thing" with organizers very savvy about what's going on with electronic tech and dance music everywhere else. What one often hears and sees at Sónar is more soundscape than song, shaped more by laptops than guitars and drums. But then the sublime voice of a Neneh Cherry, a copeland, or Massive Attack's Elizabeth Fraser brings humanity back to the software.
Music critics and regular festival goers tell BlouinARTINFO they get a sense that a new generation is emerging at Sónar. It goes something like this: children raised on their parents' punk records, Hip Hop, video games and Kubrick movies; who went to college to absorb Cage, Warhol, Derrida and film theory; who entered adult life with the magically transforming personal tech that led to social media, omnipotent music software, climate change, rampant globalization, the CGI of Pixar and Matrix … became visually and aurally polymorphous, politically and culturally jaded, but throughly liberalized by the Obama-era changes in gay rights and universal health care.
As many as 80-thousand of festival goers, primarily from all across Europe, descend on Barcelona for the three-day festival featuring a range of genres at venues all over town. Many sport what appears to be the un-official uniform of oversized sunglasses and trendy flip flops. Sónar makes for great people-watching with a rainbow mix of universals (tattoos, jeans, t-shirt graphics, radical hair) with a European accent. The city's welcoming, amiable character makes it a particularly mellow festival; lines into shows are long, but jolly. It's the music that's serious, not the crowd.
