Fear and Loathing in Barcelona
World Wide · 12.07.2007
By Анна Лекс
For the first time the feeling that I was starring in a film took hold of me at Sonar. Not because there were lots of people around from Dj Mag covers and Technics posters, but because for all three days of the festival the music pursued me - in the streets, at home, on the beach and at the festival itself - and it seemed like a soundtrack written specially for a merry weekend in Barcelona. Quite a lot has been said about the festival's 14-year history, about its inspirers, Laurent Garnier, budgets and scale. But behind all the names and figures there was always hidden something more significant, something that explains Sonar's staggering success - its spirit, intoxicating and narcotically dangerous. Believe me, Sonar is not a festival! Sonar is a three-day state of the city of Barcelona, when it's not just the people but the very sand on the beach that starts to dance. But first things first...
It was very hurtful and baffling when I learned that my Spanish friends weren't planning to go to Sonar. "I don't want to pay 170 euros for tickets", they told me, "We have another idea for how to spend this weekend!". In the end it turned out there was more than one idea. A couple of days before Sonar, when we were at a reggae party on the beach, two Spanish girls dressed as nuns and handing out flyers to all the holidaymakers came into our field of view. They didn't overlook us either, and I ended up holding several posters reading as follows: in the coming days at club Nitsa the DJs performing would be Hell, Koze, Reinhard Voigt, Tobias Thomas, Roman Flugel, Ellen Allien, Apparat, Pig & Dan, Ivan Smagghe and many others, entry 15 euros. And there was more - at club The Loft you could catch DJ sets by Tiga, Princess Superstar, Tiefschwarz, Sven Vath, Steve Bug, The Hacker, Agoria and many others, entry 20 euros. Yet another bright-pink flyer announced that on 14 June the Raum Playa festival would take place on the beach, with DJs Gabriel Ananda, Funk D'Void, Dapayk, Audiofly, Laurine Frost & Coldfish, 3 Channels and many others in the line-up, entry 15 euros. After this my hands simply dropped; I could already barely make out the names on the next flyer, but I remember it had Miss Kittin, Alexander Kowalski live, Stephan Bodzin live, Aril Brikha live, Booka Shade live and so on. Now it became perfectly clear to me why thrifty Europeans begrudge 170 euros for Sonar. In any case, we didn't lose our heads and reached a compromise - with my journalist's accreditation I could avoid the cost of buying Sonar tickets, and the guys chose the "hottest" night at Sonar and spent only 45 euros each. "Did you know that practically all Spaniards ignore Sonar because it's so expensive? We can go to any other place for much less money and hear the same artists, and sometimes even better. For the most thrifty we came up with the AntiSonar, which takes place not far from the night-time Sonar, out in a field. Harder music plays there, but on the other hand it's all free!" - my Barcelona acquaintances told me. I remember it was precisely then that my head started to spin from such a mad concentration of electronic music in one place. This was the flip side of Sonar.
were issuing accreditations, and my journey began... The same unchanging artificial turf covered all the free space of the museum, six stages and thousands of people, Spanish sun and electronic music, and there was a strange sense of freedom hanging in the air... or was it the smell of the American sixties? Hard to say... better to feel it or see it. In any case, the only serious problem at Sonar,
and at other bars and clubs too, was the shortage of rolling paper; every day someone would ask me in various accents: "Do you have a paper?", but I had no paper, only the yellow Sonar programme and a plastic cup of whisky. Guided by my little programme as if by a bible, I went from stage to stage, more and more amazed at the scale of what was happening. Just take the one Japanese label, Noble, brought into the SonarDome. Kazumasa Hashimoto and Piana with live sets melted the minds of those present in the very best Asian traditions. But the main thing was still ahead - the night-time Sonar of the first day with the Beastie Boys gala concert. My evening had been planned by my friends in advance, and they brooked no objections. For better or worse, I went off to dine at a cosy Brazilian restaurant, and what happened at the first night-time Sonar was recounted to me by Nina Kraviz (Nina is at Sonar for the second year running; in 2006 she played the festival for the Red Bull Music Academy) and Arkady Air:
Nina Kraviz: "I found out about the Beastie Boys back in my tender years. A friend of mine, a very cool guy with his own tape deck and a Zhiguli model nine car, gave me a cassette. The cassette was so-so, if not for one song. It was Intergalactic. Many years passed. The guy drank himself into the ground. Driving Mercedes became fashionable. But the song remained. Out of context. In short, their concert was a real event for me. Thousands had gathered in the hall. A dream, simply. And I still wasn't among those thousands. I was running late. Finding a free taxi in Barcelona at night is a big problem. I borrowed a decrepit scooter from my friend and within 15 minutes had got lost somewhere on the outskirts of Barcelona. Anyway, when I finally reached the pavilion and entered the hall, the Beasties were finishing their last three numbers. They
immediately doused me in beer, and someone trod very hard on my right foot. I barely noticed. The concert was semi-instrumental. The concert was killer. The already-grown-up Beasties leapt about the stage like new. The stage was flooded with light from bright bulbs and all sorts of shimmering little balls. Inside I was burning with happiness. Then it all ended. There were fewer people, and those who remained drifted to the bar for beer, so as to have something to douse the folks in clean clothes with.
Half an hour later the stage was dismantled and before us materialised eight people with laptops, MIDI controllers, drum machines and samplers. These were those very newfangled Narod Niki - a techno-concert, an orchestra in which everyone plays or controls something in real time and total improvisation. They say the "people's" line-up features the best techno minds. Hmm... We'll see. I immediately recognised Villalobos, Hawtin, Luciano and Monolake, who, it seemed to me, was the senior one there and stood at the main desk with the most impressive quantity of cables. The girls by the stage were shouting like mad: "Richie!!! Ricardo!!!"
I thought it would be boring. Ten minutes in I had my doubts: some incredible deep sound poured out of the speakers. None of your clicks and crunches. Then the guys swam over into dense bass lines, like in house from the nineties. Someone very aptly threw out the most beautiful vocal samples. In short, it was killer. I danced for two hours on nothing but water and was absolutely happy. Arkady Air, whom I happened to meet by the stage, won't let me lie".
Arkady Air: I'll begin, I suppose, by saying that I set off alone to the opening concert featuring the Beastie Boys and Ricardo Villalobos's project with the amusing name Narod Niki. The rest of the gang, led by Oleg Magdi, having learned that Barcelona had a place called Mix (which turned out to be a nice little stylish bar with a DJ booth built into the wall and music a la Lindstrom & Prins Thomas), went off to investigate it and, having found it, decided to hang out there, justifying their reluctance to go to the concert by the fact that:
a) it's far from here
b) a 3-day accreditation doesn't grant free entry and you have to pay 30 or 40 euros to get in
c) the Beastie Boys are performing tomorrow too.
I had no strength left to drink, and I was about to head to the hotel, but while looking for a taxi I couldn't shake the thought that the festival programme had announced two different shows by one of the most beloved groups of my childhood, adolescence and youth - an instrumental one on Thursday, dedicated to the release of the new album The Mix Up, and a full-scale one on Friday with all the hits - so I decided to go there alone (when else would I see such a thing!). I didn't regret it for a second! I arrived literally 5 minutes before the start. From the very first
chords of "B For My Name" shivers ran down my spine and didn't stop until the very end. Mike D on drums, Adrock on guitar, MCA on bass, Money Mark on keys, Mixmaster Mike on the turntables - what more could you dream of! The guys played many tracks from the new album, interspersing them with dub and punk sketches. Of the hits they played Whatcha Want, Sure Shot and 3 MC's & 1 DJ. It had been a long time since I'd been so happy from music alone. The performance ended with Mike D raising a toast to the wonderful city of Barcelona, and Adrock promising
that not a single track of what they'd played today would be repeated the next day. Curtain. The words Narod Niki appeared on the big screens and some 10 technicians began assembling an enormous table, onto which appeared equipment, equipment and yet more equipment. 8 or 9 Macs + mixers, synthesizers, groove boxes, effects units, etc. Then the techno heroes themselves appeared - Ricardo Villalobos, Richie Hawtin, Luciano and 5 more fighters whose faces I didn't recognise. Their performance impressed me no less than the previous one. Stunning psychedelic techno-house. Real improvisation. The "narodniks" composed hypnotic rhythms, programming the machines on the fly (on the big screens you could clearly see the patterns being punched in and hear them on air a few seconds later), and at the head of it all, at the big mixing desk, Ricardo directed the process - mixing, adding and taking away what his colleagues squeezed out of their devices. After an hour and a half Luciano relieved him at the helm, and soon Richie too reached the command bridge and loaded up 20-25 minutes of the most minimal rhythm possible, all but lulling me and Nina Kraviz - whom I was lucky to meet on the dancefloor - to sleep, so we decided to head to club Razzmatazz, where the Get Physical label party was to take place. The club reminded me of the old club Gorod on Shmitovsky Proyezd in Moscow. As it turned out, it was a party by an English dj magazine called This Is Hardcore. At 4 in the morning Tiga was playing on the main dancefloor, M.A.N.D.Y. on the second floor and, in the small bar, Tiefschwarz!
magazines. The grey stand with the word Cocoon drew me in instantly, like a magnet. Sorting through the fresh releases, I muttered dazedly under my breath: "ooh, a new Sven Vath release, wow! The Sound of the Seventh Season, my dream!"; while I was mumbling all this, out of the corner of my eye I saw a man in a white T-shirt cheerfully chatting with the sellers... it was Sven Vath. My joy knew no bounds; we all took a photo together, asked how he
was doing, when he was planning to come to Russia, and simply talked about music. Well, for me that was enough, all the more so as a night to the sounds of my favourite German techno label still lay ahead. What's interesting is that meeting your favourite DJ at the Sonar expo is very easy: in the long corridor many well-known labels were represented, and accordingly their founders or musicians spent their time right there, chatting with colleagues, giving autographs and posing for photos
with fans. In this respect Sonar pleasantly surprised me.
The festival's daytime programme was originally built as experimental and creative; here it's hard to come across big names or celebrated live projects. The indie music direction in all its glory, young talents, groups performing in the style of lounge, idm, hip-hop, glitch, drum'n'bass, easy listening and so on, and moreover for the most part not lacking in charm and shock value. Hot Finnish lads from the Hot as Hel label set the SonarVillage alight from six to ten in the evening. At eight Mira Calix performed with Alexander's Annexe, and a hot night lay ahead. As Steve Martin wrote: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture", so I can only imagine the night-time Sonar of the second day, exceeding the scale of any average rave, with Richie Hawtin, Justice, Timo Maas, the Beastie Boys again and many others in the line-up. And since I'm heading to club The Loft, I hand over to Andriesh Gandrabur (Andriesh is the only Russian to have had the honour of performing at Sonar 2007 for the Red Bull Music Academy), Arkady Air and Nina Kraviz:
Andriesh: "The thing is, I was supposed to arrive a day before Sonar opened, but since the visa-printing machine at the Austrian embassy broke down (I was to fly via Austria) I couldn't leave for three days. My performance had been scheduled for the first day. I'd already given up hope, but unexpectedly I was issued the visa, my performance was moved to the last day, and I flew out at once. So I witnessed only one day of Sonar and one night.
I witnessed the second Beastie Boys performance. It all took place in a huge pavilion, so huge that I'd never seen the like in my life. And thousands upon thousands of people. It astounded me. In a word - global. Somehow the sound across the whole site was excellent. Since at the night-time Sonar
there were several such gigantic dancefloors, I only caught the middle of the Beastie Boys' set. And the whole time I was walking from the back of the hall towards the stage. The Beastie Boys played loud and wide, sparing neither their bodies nor their instruments. Nothing like what you experience there can be experienced in any other club, even the biggest, with the most powerful sound and light.
There was a certain clearly expressed mood, assembled from different corners of the world. Everyone! Absolutely everyone experienced the same explosive
emotions, and these thousands upon thousands, simply a sea of people getting desperately high on the music. The Beastie Boys were the coolest and remained so, smashing the hell out of their instruments to the simultaneous roar of not so much a crowd as a whole small nation.
At a festival like this you don't feel like a foreigner, but as if you're in a shared country where all is well. Moving from one gigantic hall to another, you hear such polar-opposite music that you immediately understand
what you really like. But it's hard to choose. Since I'm a drum'n'bass fan, I lingered a long while at the English stage.
By the way, there was a great amusement there - electric bumper cars like at a funfair. Riding around and ramming into each other to loud music... a total blast!
Kross and I were carried out onto the dancefloor where Richie Hawtin was to play; some girls speaking clipped English asked whether we were Mexicans. We had a laugh and said "Si-si". Funnily enough, before Richie some jolly hardcore was playing, so fast even for hardcore, and so happy, that at times it resembled a polka or something of the sort. Hawtin started off dark and kept on that way. For about 15 minutes there was no beat at all. Then it kicked off. And I liked it enormously; he'd wander off somewhere into dub, then even into house, but all of it dark. At such a scale and in such a state I had the feeling I was at the centre of a war of the worlds. Imagine huge floodlights - you don't see the light source, it's somewhere far away, almost where the sky is, and this source covers a kilometre with bright light and moves to the music.
In short, it blew my mind.
The video art also amazed me. It was simply brilliant, always reflecting the music and always in time with it. Sometimes it just got downright frightening to look at the screen, where a swarm of little white sticks on a black background formed themselves into patterns to the music. I don't know why, but it made a strong impression on me.
The festival's organisation was top-notch. Inside I didn't meet a single security guard or policeman, yet there was relative order everywhere; no one was throwing their weight around or fighting, on the contrary they were kissing and hugging, smoking joints and so on. When, utterly wrung out, we went outside, a line of buses was ferrying the ravers to the city centre".
Arkady Air: On the second night there were so many people that being in the hall where the Beastie Boys were performing was simply unbearable. Very cramped and very stuffy, despite the fact that the hall this
time was twice the size of the previous one, which blurred the impressions of the concert. Everything was killer, all the main hits - Intergalactic, Body Movin', Sabotage - but the hall was very uncomfortable. It was all made worse by a huge dark-skinned security guard who suddenly materialised out of the darkness and demanded that Lyosha Viper take out of his video camera and hand over the cassette on which he'd been filming the concert. The guard was not in our weight class, and we had to give him what he wanted
, otherwise he threatened to escort us out into the street. Having caught my breath after the concert and slaked my thirst with the excellent local draught Budweiser, I headed to the dancefloor called Sonar Lab, where representatives of the new English musical style - dubstep - were performing, with which up to that point I'd been fairly superficially acquainted, associating it above all with grime, which irritates me. What I heard was the complete opposite -
the sound of London's industrial suburbs. Dark, deep string melodies, minimalist breakbeat rhythms and the fattest of basses. Kode 9, Oris Jay and Skream kept me absolutely hypnotised for 2 hours on the dancefloor. Everything else, against this backdrop, paled in the vividness of impressions that night.
Nina Kraviz: "The second Beastie Boys concert differed little from the first. Everything was flawless: "3 MCs and 1 DJ", as if they were twenty again. That happens very rarely, and in that sense we all got very lucky.
Right after the concert I headed to Sonar Lab to hear some dubstep on a good sound system (lately I've become seriously keen on it and have even started playing it from time to time). At the decks Kode 9 was working his magic, squeezing out kilohertz of booming, aggressive bass that got right into the bones. The sound at this stage was, as always, the best at the night-time Sonar. After a while my beloved Skream replaced Kode 9 and dropped such bass that the whole site went into an ecstatic wobble. It felt like the end of the world approaching. Out in the open air he played all his hits and finished us off for good. To keep from being left deaf, I had to resort to homemade earplugs made of cigarette filters. Unforgettable.
In the neighbouring Sonar Club, famous not only for its big names but also for its huge size with monstrous sound, old Rich (Richie Hawtin) was finishing up. His clever, freshly-dyed and noticeably better-looking head, pressed to his right headphone, was practically motionless. Hawtin was playing his usual mannered techno. Not waiting for the end, I headed for the exit. On the way to the scooter I ran into my old acquaintance Susie.
- Where are you off to? Aren't you going to the AntiSonar?
- What AntiSonar?
Five minutes later I was there. It turned out the AntiSonar was in full swing and located literally around the corner from the official Sonar. An illegal rave of some two thousand people sprawled across the grounds of an abandoned factory car park in the open air. The time - past five in the morning. Entry - free.
Dress code - the simpler, the better. Pets - no problem. Drinks - at the nearest bar - on a folding table for 2-3 euros. Seven "dancefloors" with music ranging from the harshest techno to drum'n'bass. Though it was hard to call all these dusty open-air gatherings dancefloors. They were more like corners. I hadn't seen anything like it in ten years! The reggae corner stuck in my memory. A dark-skinned lad in a green beret, on a monstrous, wheezing sound system
(the first sound systems in Jamaica many years ago were probably like this) was playing the most soulful music on 7-inches. Some guy with dreads spotted his microphone: "Hand over the mic, amigo!"
All in all, in my memory the "amigo" gave up the mic about ten times. Including to yours truly. It turned into a very entertaining reggae jam. The morning sun, the smell of cannabis, dogs, the concentrated smell of merriment and completely different people all around
- all this created a feeling of utter surrealism.
Nine in the morning. Susie and I have already been having fun for a whole hour on the drum'n'bass dancefloor. At the decks stands a very handsome gypsy in a hat and with a bare torso. His girlfriend tries to scratch without permission, but he only smiles. The gypsy is impeccable. Not a single naff record and perfect technique. The crowd only grows with every hour. Sonar has long since ended and now all these clean, pretty party-goers are crowding beside us. It's getting hot. Almost noon. The AntiSonar is in full swing. Well, in short, you all understand..."
I wasn't sure I'd find the strength for the daytime Sonar, but I had no intention of skipping the night one, and so my destination was bed. With a gurgling ringing in my ears I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, to the flat where we were staying for a while in Barcelona. (It has to be said that the houses in the Gothic Quarter - the historic part of the city - are set indecently close to one another; the pedestrian street between
them is no more than five metres wide.) Having taken a quick shower I lay down in bed, but I never did manage to sleep. In the adjoining room of our neighbours someone had cranked up hardcore at a very decent volume; in the house opposite (an arm's length away) someone had brought a tape deck out onto the balcony and put on Deep Dish; a floor below you could make out techno from Jeff Mills's latest disc. Towards noon local musicians with drums drifted out into the street and played something resembling capoeira music all day long. "The festival isn't over, and there's little hope of a rest" - I thought, and we headed to the beach, where the music was at least quieter...
Andriesh: "The next day I performed at the daytime Sonar. Since I needed to prepare, I barely saw what was going on that day; I had two hours to, with mouth
agape, watch what was happening around me. I was in total outer space, so I can't say anything definite or specific beyond "e-e-er, coo-o-ol!".
I played after Douglas Greed, my friend and producer from Germany, who whipped the crowd into a frenzy on the hottest (in every sense) dancefloor - at the daytime Sonar (Red Bull Music Academy Lounge). By that point there were already so many people there that the escalator leading up to it was occasionally stopped and switched to run the other way.
My set went well. Starting was terrifying, my hands were shaking. A mass of people, and not just people - a bloody international festival, everyone waiting to see what I'd show them. Whether they'd dance to my music or not, who the hell knew. But in the end this crowd was the most appreciative in all my time performing. I was happy!"..
Arkady Air: Waking up for the daytime Sonar on Saturday was the hardest of all, considering that after the night-time Sonar we'd gone off wandering the beaches of the Barceloneta district. I performed a feat by getting up to
the alarm and arriving in time for the start of the set by the three-time DMC champions, the Frenchmen C2C. I expected to see and hear new tricks, but they presented a medley of the best moments of their battle performances. Then I was really looking forward to Junior Boys, but live they didn't sound as good as on their studio albums and I was left a little disappointed. But the one who delighted me beyond words was our compatriot Andriesh! The music closest to me. Very cool, very interesting and very danceable - the Red Bull Music Academy dancefloor
was torn to shreds, as, for that matter, was I. Meeting him in the city that evening, I was so impressed that I didn't even know how to say how much I'd liked it and how cool it had been. So now, a month on, I take the opportunity to send Andriesh my greetings and say a huge thank you!
For the last night-time Sonar we prepared thoroughly; awaiting us were Devo, Jeff Mills, Dave Clarke, Ame, Miss Kittin and others. "Music tells nothing to the mind. It is perfectly structured nonsense" - that was exactly how I wanted to think that night, and Anthony Burgess was probably right. Sonar by Night on 16 June is etched in my memory forever. Past the ticket-and-accreditation control, we entered Fira Gran Via - a huge exhibition centre divided into four gigantic dancefloors with bars and toilets around the perimeter and enormous screens suspended from the ceiling. Everything necessary was there and nothing superfluous. By the entrance sat the Energy Control zone - a place where we could pick up useful leaflets and test our future state. Beyond stretched thick corridors; people strolled, stood and danced, cheerful clips spun on the screens, music thundered, lasers dazzled, strobes boomed, electric cars raced, the indoor dancefloors vibrated to a single beat, the open-air dancefloors breathed music - this was the real Sonar. At five in the morning Miss Kittin took to the decks in the open-air SonarPub zone; it was already light and you could make out the faces of the 10,000 dancing people. To be honest, I'd never seen so many smiles and so much happiness in one place at one time, all the more so to the raspy-lyrical vocals of Miss Kittin's "I can looove"...
After-party. Then came the time for the after-party, and had we not been misinformed, we wouldn't have
ended up on the beach at 10 in the morning. "Come along, there'll be a Minus label party right after the night-time Sonar, come! See you there!" - our acquaintances shouted to us as we left the night-time Sonar. In the end the police shut down the Minus label party, and we peacefully fell asleep face-down in the sand somewhere on the Mediterranean coast. By two in the afternoon I came to and turned my head: "Where am I? What is this? Fly Away in Serebryany Bor? No. This is Marbella beach, Barcelona...". In two hours a party was due to start on Marbella beach
by the Kompakt label, and without a second thought we headed home to change and wash the sand off our faces. Our reserves of happiness, strength and emotion were running out, but that couldn't stop us; Sonar had officially ended, but we and another ten thousand people hadn't finished our own Sonar. And so it was: by 16:00 local time Marbella beach and all the nearby beaches were flooded with people - people who were tired, international, beautiful and happy. No cool monsoon could
cool the crowd on the shore, vibrating tightly in time to the music with some kind of inhuman delight. As dusk fell, an enveloping fog descended on the mind after the three-day Sonar trip; we were no longer exchanging rapturous remarks about Miss Kittin's set, we'd already forgotten what had happened the day before, we just danced, and it seemed we needed nothing more.
Andriesh was also struck by all these beach after-parties: "But the biggest impressions were outside Sonar. For example, the free parties by Kompakt and Minus and many other labels. On the beach, in a totally relaxed setting, in shorts and barefoot, the DJs play, one on one with the crowd. It was unforgettable. We just dropped into some little bar where I saw a dude who looked very much like Superpitcher. And then it turned out to really be him; then Michael Mayer came and started playing, then my hero DJ Koze, and all this is an everyday thing - a rave at every step, you can't walk along the beach without ending up partying somewhere. And it all ended with an utterly super-global rave on the seashore, which I won't even talk about, because words already fail me".
That was Sonar 2007.
Now it's hard for me to imagine that from 14 to 16 June parties were taking place anywhere in the world other than Barcelona. And I'll probably hardly be able to miss the next Sonar. And meanwhile - awaiting June 2008 - I can enjoy the little film that my friends and I edited together from the fragments we shot over those crazy three days.