Sónar satisfies anxiety about evasion in Barcelona

• Sónar 2022 The Chemical Brothers, The Blaze and Arca as first artists

After two years of the pandemic, the return to festival normality could have occurred in two incompatible ways: either people got fed up with the music and the crowds, and therefore did not come back anymore, or there was a rebound effect and in instead of people we would have the crowd.

It was sensed what was going to happen, but it had to be confirmed.

The first day of the reactivation

confirms the second: hours passed and the daytime space of

was shrinking as thousands of people entered.

There was a desire to party and escape, and Sónar -which always welcomes with a wonderful green floor,

has returned, like

, to continue where it left off in 2019.

It is not a Sónar at full artistic performance -there are many national participants on the line-up, few Americans and hardly any Asians-, but it is sufficiently indicative of the paths along which music moves, intellectually or playfully, supported by in the technology.

This year, this didactic function has been reinforced in the general programming: the

-which replaces the

, where the new wave of trap and urban music began to spread- is a forum for conferences on the future of the internet and creation through artificial intelligence, a kind of Ted talks a few meters from where firewood is distributed.

One of the first aesthetic lines that can be seen in the poster, for example, is that makineo returns and, by extension, the nostalgic revision of the 90s. As the hours passed, in some scenarios the beats per minute increased: the duo

, for example, flooded the

with jets of classic acid house and a throwback to the old English progressive sound of bands like

or

.

In the same way, on the

, it quickly went from digital twerking to raver nostalgia

swelled up to recover the old New York epic house of the early 90s-, and here and there there were those who evoked retro aromas -

and broken English house from the turn of the century,

and happy hardcore- anticipating that, shortly, the next cod route could be global.

, the teenager from Barcelona who has revolutionized trap with emo melodies and who, on his new album, '

, reviews raw music created 15 years before he was born, like the apocalyptic gabber,

also signed up for the hardcore fever

.

His concert began, however, with a very different look: he starred in the most grotesque entrance of the year -carried by Nazarenes as an effigy of Christ with Japanese smoothing-, and began his concert by covering his songs with a mummified rock language, which sometimes it sounded like

and other times like

groups .

Pure adolescent postmodernism, a potpourri of influences without hierarchy and some leap into the void.

Those who play it, but being clear that they aspire to fly away, are the two components of

, who improve live what on disc -the recent '

(2021)- is already an intelligent exercise in technological revision of the vocal language.

In their live show, they processed voices, were accompanied by a choir, sang in Greek, Spanish and Catalan, fused the Middle Ages, folklore, artificial intelligence and noise with the timbre of angels, and established themselves as the best opening proposal for a Sónar that It already stands out for the mass bath that it is anticipating, and that added to the heat promises a true inferno album.

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