Photo: Press
The Sonar remit has always stood for championing obscure, esoteric electronic music. But the expansion from 6,000 visitors over two decades ago to 115,000 at this year’s event shows just how much potential a fringe festival as diverse as this one can have.
Curiously though, despite its arrival as one of the most important festivals in Europe, and with the peppering of headline names alongside the more arcane acts now on offer, its size hasn’t diluted the quality or the integrity of its name.
That said, Sonar’s experimental roots were still very much in evidence last weekend. Here are our highlights.
The Black Madonna
Marea Vierge-Noire, aka The Black Madonna, really does know how to bring the party. Playing an early slot during the first of three Sonar by Days she sets an eager Thursday afternoon crowd off with an arsenal of upbeat house and a flurry of deep, banging techno.
But the Kentucky-born, Chicago-based DJ-producer is publicly at odds with much of what she deems as “the status quo” of dance music, saying that “dance music needs riot girlls” and that “it needs discomfort with its euphoria”. These sentiments set the tone, and after a rework of ‘For the Kraftwerk’ by DJ Sly (IT) drops, followed by Danny Daze’s ‘Swim’, the sun cracks through the clouds and Sonar feels like it is well and truly under way.
Kelela
“If you’d told me 5 years ago that I’d be singing to all of you I would have told you to get the fuck outta my face,” admits Kelela, to a packed Thursday SonarHall audience. It’s easy to forget that the force behind this potent live act of deep, gritty-come-pretty, alternative R&B was telemarketing a mere 4 years ago. Her poise is mesmerizing; her voice precisioned and beautiful.
‘A Message’, one of many tracks met with rapturous applause, exemplifies her grace and bewitching talent. Vocally, she cuts from the double cloth of both Eska and Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano, managing to inject an ethereal quality into what would otherwise comfortably sit as an urban sound. While the LA-based singer was probably excellent at cold calling, I think it’s easy to say she’s found her true calling now.
Insanlar
Turkish 4-piece iNSANLAR, as is traditional with much of Turkish-style music, are built from a kind of marching metric, steadily striding and steadily stomping. Shrouded in Near Eastern mystique, their shamanistic techno folk hybrid creeps up on you to form something unexpectedly spiritual and hypnotic.
What‘s great though is how the East intersects with the West, where traditional baglamas and Turkish singing merge with house beats and synths to form a truly global sound. Their 2013 single ‘Kim Ne’ didn’t disappoint. Not only is it their only release to date, but it’s responsible for lifting them above the horizon and onto world stages such as Sonar. The significance is palpable, and during the track’s 23-minutes their punkish attitude and unhinged acid sound smoulders from the smoke-filled stage.
Kode9 and Lawrence Lek: The Notel
One of the most interesting conceptual experiences of the festival came courtesy of Scottish producer Kode9 and German visual artist Lawrence Lek’s collaborative project, The Notel. Based on tracks from the musician’s latest LP, Nothing, Lek constructs a post-human, deserted space where a first person perspective moves through a series of rooms whereby our unique gaze bears witness to an automated world of holograms, spectres and downright spookiness.
From the off, the clinical yet futuristic environment reflect the sterile suspense of intro tunes ‘Zero Point Energy’ and ‘Notel’. Our camera glides to the latter along a series of laptop screens, each revealing world stock market graphs plummeting one after the other, losing all value. From here the album more or less plays out in order to a sequence of events that trigger track transitions, akin to picking up items during a video game. Most notable was a laptop flashing with ‘INFINITE PLAY’ and a digital form of a piano, cueing in ‘Vacuum Packed’ in what was to spark an explosive yet unsettling audiovisual experience.
Dawn of Midi
What happens when you give jazz a set of serrated teeth and the balls to go full carnivore? Brooklyn trio Dawn of Midi gave a pretty emphatic, instrumental answer to that question at SonarComplex during the close of Friday’s Sonar by Day. Here is a unit of unbelievably gifted musicians, excelling in achieving a level of predatory grace that is, quite frankly, not normal.
The band play an extended version of their latest album Dysnomia, absorbing a packed seated audience from beginning to end. Their syncopated rhythms - on piano, contrabass and drums - coarsen and cushion in and out of time to a blaze of strobing strip lights, your mind lucidly exploring the space within their infinite soundscape of expansion and contraction. It’s extremely difficult to think of a group that grossly outsizes the sum of their parts in such a phenomenal way, typified by the driving ‘Algol’ and the swelling prowl of show coda ‘Prancercise’. Fittingly, the standing ovation tore through the walls for quite some time.
Helena Hauff b2b Ben UFO
Somewhere around 3.00am at Friday night’s SonarLab, Hessle Audio boss Ben UFO and rising star Helena Hauff joined forces for their first b2b show together behind the dishes. On the whole it was unforgiving. Pounding electro-soaked techno full of steely stabs and curling arpeggiators steering a huge open air crowd down a deep, dark club route - but only if they held on for dear life.
And hold on for dear life they did, hoovering up plate after plate of broken banger after broken banger. Deep cuts like The Persuader’s ‘What Is The Time, Mr Templar?’ and some forthcoming releases from both Tessela and Pearson Sound offered some much needed respite, in what was a bracing stompathon marching fearlessly into the business end of the night.
Oneotrix Point Never
If the Sonar agenda is in pushing the experimental envelope then Oneotrix Point Never takes it to its most deliciously ludicrous conclusion. Never has someone made mess so unmissable, or managed to marry apocalypse and nostalgia with such thrilling vision. His songs, after all, take on an album-like depth in themselves, such is the breadth of sound he seems to cover.
Here, Daniel Lopatin finds the same sonic density over an hour of live laptoping, with SonarHall blown to smithereens by the breakneck horror show of tracks like ‘Sticky Drama’, the ambient atmospherics of ‘The Knuckleheads’ and the jumping CD glitch-ride of ominous builder ‘I Bite Through It’. The show, along with some disturbing visuals, swells in fits of anger and lulls of relief, as if Lopatin is using his platform for some kind of audio self-therapy. Ironically enough, amidst all the chaos, his music does feel oddly cathartic, symbolic of life events, emotions, urging you to confront your most innate hopes and fears through the unforgiving thrust of his ideas.
