The Daily Swarm

SONAR: Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art is the greatest electronic music festival in the world. But it’s much, much more than just dance music. Founded in 1993 by Enric Palau, Sergio Caballero and Ricard Robles, Sónar does present the greatest DJ in the world in front of a ravenous, open-minded audience. But it is as known for new commissions and world premieres as it is for presenting the newest, most visionary sounds in electronic music. If you judge the success of a music festival by the numbers of smiles you see on people’s faces, this one would win by a mile.

The Daily Swarm spent an hour with curator Enric Palau to talk about the history of the festival, what it means to Barcelona, how he discovers new music, and the highlights of this year’s festival, which took place last weekend in Barcelona. All the live video footage scattered around this feature is from last weekend.

The Daily Swarm: How do would define the Sónar brand?

Enric Palau: For the people who have been at Sónar, my wish is that Sónar is an experience. It’s a way we fit together electronic art, visual art and sound art on an environment when we invite artists, audiences, and people from the business – not only from the music business, we are now attracting people from marketing, curators coming from museums and all the festivals, developers of new software or new hardwares for music and video. The way the festival approaches what we want to explain to people… sometimes we do very radical, very experimental, in a way very academic things, but we’re very open as to the way we invite people to get in [to all this]. We don’t ask for any degree before buying a ticket – we want to merge the most experimental to the most fun, entertaining party elements together at one event.

What that always original goal from the very beginning?

Yes, that was always the goal, and the [only] variations have been in the way the music and technology has changed over the last 16 years. We’ve been driving the festival through what we find all over the world.

Have you been with the festival all 16 years? Do you remember who played the first year?

Yes, I am the founder and organizer with my two collegues [Sergio Caballero and Ricard Robles]. The first year we had Vapourspace playing on the floor, he had that amazing track [“Gravitational Arch of 10”]. He was wearing a jacket like Kevin Schwantz – y’know one of these bike drivers, like Valentino Rossi! It was him and Holger Czukay from Can, and we had a very important industrial band from Spain called Esplendor Geometrico, and we had Laurent Garnier and Sven Vath.

How many people attended? How many people will attend this year?

We had 6,000 people that year and will have around 80,000 this year running over the 3 days and 2 nights. Capacity in the daytime is between 10,000 and 15,000, nighttime between 15,000 and 24,000.

Sónar is more than just a music festival. It’s presented in collaboration with the Center of Contemporary Culture and the Museum of Contemporary Art. What do those cultural institutions bring to the table?

Also the City Council of Barelona and also the area of Catalonia – they are also part of the team. We have funding coming from these public institutions, in total adding up to 10% of our operating costs. Specifically the Center of Contemporary Culture and the Museum of Contemporary Art also bring us their spaces. And we collaborate with them producing a specific activity or exhibition.

How do you work with the city of Barcelona on a festival of this size? Were they supportive at the beginning? Are there any obstacles you face? Have you had any problem with noise or drugs or the police?

We have had some period where there has been discussion of noise and drugs. We are an urban festival happening in the middle of the city. Even the night venues are close to the center of town. The support from the city institutions have always been great. We created something new. We put together different types of audiences that before were all closed around little walls: you had the experimental ones in one place, the electro-acoustic/academic ones in another side, the dance music people in another one, the radical noise people in another place, the visual arts in another place, and the theater type of audience and the cinema type of audience…. The great experience from the very beginning is we made all the audiences clash in one event, and also open all this up to a general audience that is not really consuming electronic arts all over the year. But is it following the festival as one important thing in the calendar of the cultural events of the city.

One the other side, building and growing the festival has had some inconveniences—being in the center of the city three days a year, doing noise during the daytime. We close the [Sónar By Day] music at 10pm, following the rules of the city. But the thing is, it generates a very good impact for the city, business-wise, economically for the city. In the period when people were buying more music than they are now we were continually told that the record stores in Barcelona were selling more in the week of Sónar than in Christmas. And not only this but we did a study on the financial impact for the city and the surroundings, and the result is the festival generates an impact of €50 million ($70 million) in the area. Nearly half the visitors are foreigners that spend a median of five nights in Barcelona, and they enjoy not only Sónar but all the other cultural activities in the city. So the end result is positive.

And there’s the fact that Sónar has put the name of Barcelona in an international light of cultural events and music events. Every time a politician was traveling abroad and coming back home – “I did a conference in Mexico, I did a conference in Oklahoma, and there was one guy in the audience that asked me about Sónar.” It sounds like kind of a joke, but it’s real.

Do you commission these studies each year?

Not every year but we do them regularly. There’s a whole discussion about how cultural and music and art events give an impact on commercial activities and society and to cities and countries. The car industry is very clear on what it gives and what it returns. But in our culture, music and art, it falls under a “perception.” So we worked with a company that is doing these type of studies for the Guggenheim Museum [in Bilbao], for the Barcleona football team. With this type of study we see the return on taxes to the community and to the people that are supporting us. Like the institutions – there is a real return to them.

While Sónar hosts music from all over the spectrum, it is the dance and electronic artists the festival is best known for. What does looking over your roster this year you us about the state of dance music today? Are we in a good place compared to say, five years ago or ten years ago?

I think so. We understand dance music as electronic dance music, and the whole evolution up to dubstep, this year with Martyn and Joker, it’s amazing what they do. The way dance music has a history, it comes back, and the way stage performances evolves is always interesting. This year we have Orbital and Moderat, examples of great experiences of dance music performance,

I like to consider dance music in a long glance. We invited Chic not that long ago, and this year we have James Murphy and Pat Mahoney doing their “four-hands” disco set. There is always a connection with disco, with black music, with soul, with reggae, and it regularly comes back and influences again. And the dubstep gets influenced by Jamaican dub put together with minimal techno in one way. This year we can see the Buraka Som Sistema, they make very electronic, very powerful dancefloor—oriented music, and in the case of Konono No.1 and Omar Souleyman, much much more on the traditional way. And it’s all dance music at the end. Music for celebrations.

We had the phenomenon of the skweee last year, this type of music coming from Scandinavia. Really crazy analog, funny, fun electronic stuff. We had the whole gang of six producers from that label [Flogsta Danshal], that was amazing. We can talk about the wonky evolution with Rustie and all these guys… there’s always something going on. And if you take Erol Alken, Brodinski, Crookers, all this mash up of party-oriented music with complex rhythms, it’s all very interesting.

How do you keep up with new music? What are the best, most reliable sources you use?

We are a team of music lovers. We travel. We have permanent satellites and friends. Mary Ann Hobbes from the BBC, Rob Da Bank. Friends like Pedro Winter in Paris, the guys in Moderat, Carsten Nicolai from Raster-Noton. They’re artists and they’re music lovers at the same time. We talk about new trends and exchange ideas.

And we do exchanges – we’ve done Sónar in Japan three times and we’ve done Sónar in São Paulo. it’s a great experience to get into a music scene. Japan is strange and sometimes a closed market, and being able to travel and do an event there, to built a relationship with Cornelius, with Ryuichi Sakamoto, from Towa Tei to much more underground people… and that made possible for us to do one year later a “Year of Japan at Sónar” [in 2003] bringing 20 acts from Japan. And the same experience with São Paulo. We got into the funk carioca world, we met DJ Marboro. We already knew Diplo, who is another great satellite for us. He’s amazing.

Also from São Paulo is Gui Boratto who is here now but not playing a Sónar event. Are you OK with all these un-official Sónar events that happen all over town?

It just happens natutally. More and more people want to be here for the weekend. They’ll probably be at the festival at some point. They’ll meet people here, they will go to Sónar By Night to see some specific shows. And DJs, they cannot understand being in a city and not playing records, so they need to DJ somewhere! We cannot get everyone we want in the line up every year. We already have 120 shows, which is not so many slots. We are increasing to adding another 40 slots but with that there will be more people that come…

What was your history before Sónar?

I was doing music myself with my partners on the festival, Sergio and Ricard. I did pop experimental type of music, and then with Sergio more electronic stuff, doing soundtracks for dance and film. And then we met Ricard, a journalist, and it came together.

My experience was that I knew shows and events from being onstage and backstage. I had all that experience. So from the first moment we knew what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. We always try to create the type of experience that I wanted [then], the way I wanted to be treated.

Has the recession, and especially how particularly hard Spain has been hit by unemployment, affected ticket sales and attendance?

There is a reduction on budgets of private companies in terms of sponsoring and marketing, which is affecting their participation in the festival, for sure. We are just waiting to see how it’s going to end. [Ticket] sales are pretty much at the same level of last year.

So with less sponsorship money what do you have to pull back on?

We had to compress and reduce some types of activities. We had to cut down a little bit on some costs. We cut down the SónarCinema for example, which we did a lot of investment on ideas and work but ultimately it never saw the light because it was too hidden among the festival activities. But we tried to do some reductions that would not affect the perception and the quality of the festival. For example we did not reduce the budget on talent. That is the priority.

You are the rare festivals that does satellite events around the world. Besides Toyko and São Paulo and London, you did them in New York and Washington DC last month. What are your future plans in the US?

We’d like to establish a Sónar event in the US. It’s been a long process to find the right partners in the right city. We are not in a rush because our main event is in Barcelona, but we’d like to reproduce the vibe of the Sónar event in Barcelona [in the US]. So the goal is to find a venue like the one we have in Barcelona, not only for music but music in a visual way combined with technology.

He seemingly plays ever year. Tell us specifically what Jeff Mills means to Sónar?

Jeff has played more than 10 times at Sónar. He’s a key artist in techno. And his sets at Sónar have been classic moments at the festival. If you go to a show there’s always one great moment. When you see Animal Collective you have people waiting for the moment when they do their big song “My Girls.” And if you imagine Sónar as a one-band concert, Jeff’[‘s set] is the classic in it. We cannot imagine our concert without Jeff in it. So “The Bells” is the anthem, and the energy in the room and the powerful sound system we have brings a specific experience.

In the first few years we had Jeff play Sónar, it wasn’t us. It was people always telling us about the moment they were having: that when Jeff is onstage you have to go, you have to leave everything else you are doing and you have to be there. But he doesn’t want to do the same set every year, so Sónar has been the place for him to experiment. His film project [in 2001 Mills exhibited ‘Mono’, a sculpture-installation dedicated to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey]... and it was the place last year for the reunion of Jeff Mills and Mike Banks for X-102, which was fantastic. And it was time this year to convince him to do The Wizard set. He’s playing in the daytime. The Wizard was his name on the radio a long time ago and we were pushing him. He said it was something I did in Detroit but not in Europe. But we finally convinced him.

This year you’re expanding into a new family-oriented venture – Sónar Kids. What can children expect to hear from artists like Laurent Garnier and Raster Noton?

They have children so they know a little bit what they have to do for children. [Raster Noton’s] Carsten Nicolai has three girls, and Laurent has one kid. They were very excited when we invited them. Laurent will probably approach it from a dance and musical way. And with Carsten Nicolai, I had a very interesting conversation about abstraction, because it’s very traditional to think that children need to work with very recognizable types of icons, and he was saying, “No, no way. My type of work is abstract and I can tell you how my children and other children can experiment so easily with abstraction. Little people can experience music with different senses.”

It can also be much more difficult. Kids are very honest. They don’t like, they like it, they don’t like it – there’s no middle point. They won’t stand in the front of the stage because they are friends with the singer in the band, or they came with a girlfriend and the girlfriend likes the music and they hate it but they will stand around. It’s a risk we are taking but we want this to be an experience for us, for the audience, for the artists, for everybody.

Do you get much of a chance to relax and enjoy the music you’re presenting, or is it all work all the time? Have you had any great epiphanies, any great musical moments at the festival you’ll never forget?

Sometimes. I try to see as much as possible. Sometimes it’s frustrating to miss things but sometimes I can catch them as soundchecks. The soundcheck of Sunn O))), in an empty room, was, as you can imagine, was really fantastic, amazing. And I’ve always had great experiences at the front of house in the main room at night. It’s just spectacular, the sound quality and the visual elements. I remember listening to the Masters At Work set from the front of house. I was like being in my house with the most sophisticated sound system. It was pure, quality. Fat Freddy’s Drop was amazing. I was lucky to be onstage for one hour when they were playing. Every time Jeff [Mills] is playing I take some time to go onstage and see the faces and the reactions of the people in the audience. It’s just amazing.

We know all the big artists playing. Are there any smaller artists you think are can’t-miss?

Ben Frost, very dark and ambient music, is going to be great. I discovered him on a mix that Mary Ann Hobbes did. He’s Australian, living in Ireland.

I love Micachu and the Shapes. And the co-production we’ve done with a robotic quintet made by Roland Olbeter from Bacelona, with Tim Exile and John Hopkins composing music. Four string instruments and one percussion instrument, all robots. The string instruments are only one string each, and there’s a whole machinery of playing the string to make notes and rhythms. It’s all synchronized and driven by a midi program. And Tim Exile, he’s on Warp now, and John Hopkins, a guy supporting Coldplay, making ambient, more melodic electronic music. That is a co-production with a British festival called Faster Than Sound. So we had the robots and the musicians together for a week putting together the compositions with the machines. I’m really looking forward to this. This is one of the things we created. We bring artists together to do something new.

Carl Craig closes out Sónar at around 7am Sunday morning