thu 28/03/2024

A Taste of Sónar, Roundhouse | reviews, news & interviews

A Taste of Sónar, Roundhouse

A Taste of Sónar, Roundhouse

Can summer in Barcelona be encapsulated in Camden?

The Sónar festival occupies a very special place in the New Music calendar – and is this year expanding outwards temporally and geographically, with new franchises in Tokyo and A Coruña, Galicia. Now into its 17th year, the parent festival in Barcelona serves as a vital meeting point for those of all stripes who refuse to acknowledge the polarisation of avant-garde and populism, or of club culture and the mainstream music industry. With 10 or more main stages and untold off-piste club events around the city, it would be impossible to condense even a single day and night of Sónar Barcelona into a standard gig-venue show, but that's what A Taste of Sónar tried to do last night.

IMG_8723The club element of the festival was well represented throughout the night with a series of DJs in the Roundhouse's terrace bar programmed by the Red Bull Music Academy. Closely allied to Sónar, the RBMA is another internationalist organisation which brings diverse musicians and crowds together, and which includes networking among participants as one of its main objectives; the bar was certainly packed with a lot of people with musical connections making and re-making acquaintances.

There's a fine line, though, between encouraging networking and simply filling rooms with the gaseous bellowing of industry blowhards – but the enthusiasts' ethos of both Sónar and RBMA meant that although the bar was full of chatter, the blends of disco, house, dubstep and more esoteric dance sounds were far more than wallpaper. The sounds of DJs like UK garage survivor MJ Cole and Gilles Peterson protegé Benji B (pictured above) were clearly registering with the punters, making the room feel more like a rather good party than a hip symposium.

IMG_8173In the main room, the crowd was far more varied, featuring avant-gardists in serious specs, weekend ravers of all stripes, and a large and rowdy Portuguese contingent there for Buraka Som Sistema. But before the Lisbon band came young Ipswich-born rapper Dels (pictured left) plus a heavily dreadlocked drummer and two girls playing hefty indie-rock-sounding grooves on keyboards and occasionally bass guitar. Hip hop with live instruments tends to be awfully clunky, and the initally murky sound (seemingly a common problem at the Roundhouse) didn't bode well. But once the mix was evened out, it proved to be a really engaging set; Dels's lyrics, though introspective, rarely slipping into the confessional worthiness that alternative rap can have, and the whole band wearing their musical intensity lightly. Dels himself, although superficially undemonstrative, was a compelling focal point, and looks very much like he may have the makings of a powerful stage performer.

A dramatically contrasting approach to delivering originally electronic music live came with Buraka Som Sistema (pictured below). The Lisbon collective, consisting last night of three musicians and three vocalists, have been the prime popularisers of Kuduro – a rough-and-ready form of Angolan dance music that blends rudimentary techno beats with Afro-Latin rhythms and rowdy call-and-response rhymes – and in order to take beats originally knocked together on cheap PCs to international festival audiences, use samplers, effects, a drum kit and percussionist.

IMG_8508 Starting with just the three musicians visible, Buraka's syncopated electronic groove sounded just fine – but as the drummer began to dominate this quickly built into the kind of generic “stadium techno” which used to blight festivals in the late Nineties. Thankfully, as soon as the vocalists bounded onto the stage this was turned inside out – the bombardment of quickfire chants, bouncing bass and rave bleeps full of a character all its own, and the visual spectacle of the rappers (one fat party guy, one skinny, and one statuesque woman in lycra, daubed in face/body paint to look like a cross between The Incredible Hulk and The Joker, and casually dropping some eye-popping dance moves) turning the stage and the crowd into a party rather more wild than that in the bar outside.

You'd have to be some sort of churlish snob to stand among the bouncing, grinding, limbo-ing crowd and deny the power of the stage show


Some have suggested that Buraka water down the Kuduro sound, but whatever their degree of ghetto authenticity, you'd have to be some sort of churlish snob to stand among the bouncing, grinding, limbo-ing crowd and deny the power of their stage show. Lifting huge chunks of unexpected and sometimes ridiculous bits of pop (Daft Punk, Neneh Cherry, Lionel Richie, Terence Trent D'arby), never letting up on the clattering beats that threaten to, but never quite do, fall apart, delivering songs about raising a middle finger to the world or simply chanting “We stay up all night!” over and over, there was nothing subtle or particularly clever about what they were doing, nor did they pretend there was. But to express the raw vitality of dance music, the constant presence of which prevents Sónar becoming a nerd-fest, you couldn't pick a better act than Buraka Som Sistema.

IMG_8793 The Gaslamp Killer is musically raw in a different way. William Benjamin Benussen, looking like nothing so much as a Yippie agitator with his massive Jewfro hair and bandito moustache, stood alone on stage behind his DJ decks and immediately began slamming incongruous pieces of music together. Loping hip-hop beats and original Sixties psychedelia predominated, but arcade-game bleeps and slithering electronica kept sliding in from the sides too. At first it was merely puzzling, a schizophrenic exercise in absurdist contrasts, and despite his undeniably electric stage presence the audience milled around, some drifting away. 

But as Benussen built momentum, sometimes scratch-mixing on a classic turntable like a hip-hop wizard, at others running out to the front of the stage to electronically manipulate tracks using an iPad as controller, the psychedelic internal logic of his system became more and more apparent. Everything he did made the music seem more tactile: chopping, slithering, stretching, slipping and fracturing pieces of records into and over one another, he began to make it seem natural that one should lurch from Nina Simone into apocalyptic dubstep or from lean and mean hip hop into the most intricate of electronica.

The meandering melodies of progressive rock cropped up again and again in electronic and organic forms, as did the cosmic splurge of Sun Ra and Funkadelic, but by the time he hit a shamelessly druggy techno climax with LFO's “Freak”, the impressively large crowd that remained were throwing themselves into some cheerily bizarre but funky contortions. Everything he did was laced with esoteric reference points and unorthodox methods, and gave no choice but to let go of preconceptions and join the ride through his Technicolor mind or be left bamboozled and alienated – yet somehow at the same time, this was as much of a riotous dance party as was Buraka Som Sistema. It would indeed be impossible to encapsulate the festival in an evening, but by showing how (sometimes perversely) enjoyable such a diverse line-up could be, it gave, as promised, a taste of Sónar's distinctive approach.

Watch the video for Dels's "Shapeshift"

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters