The Sonar Report 2008 Part 2: EarPipe makes Contakt

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | Event Reviews

In the first part of EarPipe’s Sonar review we left you at the Soma La Terrazza party with a club full of glamorous people and decadent house music. Fast forward to Friday afternoon and that chic taste of vodka limon in an open air club has been replaced by a sweltering room, a furry mouth and an undying thirst for water. Being only the second day you can’t really whimper at the fact that we’re still in Barcelona, the day is glorious and one of the world’s greatest music festivals is taking place. Why feel hungover and sorry for yourself in some hot box hostel room when you can do the same outside on the fake grass of the Sonar Village whilst sipping that all important sixth mojito.

After a relatively slow crawl to the CCCB, EarPipe pitch up under a tree and relax to the various obscure bands. The first of these being a couple of natives called El Guincho who were described in the guide as a combination of funk, afro beat and African rhythms making them sound quite intriguing on paper. However I was totally confused when they opened with this. Its intro sounded a lot like the Ronette’s Be My Baby and was far from the funk and afro beats that were expected. A few more tracks in and the band edged into the African vibes and got a fair proportion of the Sonar Village on their feet. Quite an achievement considering many of the revellers tend to be struggling from the night before.

El Guincho was to be followed by EarPipe’s highlight of the day Quiet Village. Their ambient/psychedelic down tempo album Silent Movie has been receiving critical acclaim from all over and their recent RA Podcast was one of the most refreshing in recent times. But what’s most interesting is that one half of Quiet Village comes from the dark and pounding depths of Matt Edwards aka Radioslave. Much like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Matt has two guises where Quiet Village is definitely the Dr Jekyll persona. They open their Sonar set with the incredibly beautiful Victoria’s Secret, a long and winding scenic track laden with strings and clichéd wave crashes and cooing birds. They continue through their album dropping the great vintage 70s funk sounds of tracks like Can’t Be Beat and Pillow Talk. Ideal for a chilled sunny afternoon. As you can see by this video it was totally a sit down affair.

Kalabrese had the job of following Quiet Village. He made use of the opportunity to present his Rumpelorchestra from Switzerland. Together as a small three piece band they infused influences from jazz, afro-beat, funk and house. The energy from their performance got the crowd back on their feet. One thing that makes the Rumpelorchestra stand out from other outfits is their use of brass instruments which really brings in that classic jazz feel. Seems like a bit of a brass revival with Ronson and the mainstream getting involved.

For the evening, a trip to the Raum open air party was supposed to happen, but unfortunately it hadn’t started early enough to make it worth the trip. So instead EarPipe watched the surprise defeat of Croatia to Turkey before heading to Sonar by Night. On arrival to the vast venue we were greeted by the two tone sounds of Suggs and Madness. Their blend of pop and ska had the crowd singing along to all their greatest hits like One Step Beyond, Our House and It Must Be Love. Even the younger fans would have been able to join in what with Suggs doing all those fish finger commercials. A quick run over to the Sonar Park and we catch the finishing moments of BC vs JC feat. Darren Emerson. JC is infact Jamie Cullum the floppy haired jazz come easy listening artist that your parents and even your grandparents like. BC is Jamie’s brother Ben on guitar, talk about nepotism. And they’re all backed up by former Underworld brains Darren Emerson. Together they jam out a sort of soulful jazz influenced house come techno sound. Once we start looking past our music snobbery we actually find their performance quite pleasurable and to be fair BC vs JC feat Darren Emerson is a good way of introducing electronic dance music to the kids in a more palatable format, so props for that. However we are still getting over Jamie Cullum bopping his floppy haired head to electronic beats.

Meanwhile in the SonarClub, Diplo our man from Philly is entertaining the crowds with his ghetto tech and Baltimore breaks. There are no rules for this man; he plays whatever whenever so long as its got booty shakin bass riddem and tings, its just fun, unadulterated music which you can just bounce around to. He cuts and mixes everything from hip hop, techno and electro in that mashup raw way that’s currently popular. In the space of an hour I was hearing MIA edits, hip hop classics from Dead Prez, big electro numbers from Justice and even a splash of Plastikman Spastik. Diplo just delivers a whirlwind of music in such an effective manner. It’s not the sort of music we’re into down at EarPipe but it is much fun. And seeing some of the most die hard EDM fans just getting right into it is just proof of that.

Now on to the main event. The performance that was eagerly anticipated by a 10,000 strong crowd outside in the SonarPub was of course Richie Hawtin and his band of merry techno laptop technicians with a cube in tow. It was the Barcelona leg of their Contakt tour where the concept was built around a collective DJ performance creating one set rather than individual ones. Unfortunately the cube was no where to be seen, the reports from other gigs were saying that its lights changed colour but we were unable to give the official EarPipe word on that. Their introduction was very prog rock-esque. A mystical silence fell on the SonarPub before the black curtain was drawn back to reveal quite an impressive LED stage as an eerie soundscape comes in over the speaker. Like an epic prog rock entrance, Richie Hawtin rises from behind the laptops to rapturous applause. He continues to tweak the eerie soundscape whilst slowly bringing on each of the Contakt family one by one. As they do, their names are emblazoned in giant letters on the LED screen. It’s all very Spinal Tap, they probably had the system turned up to 11.

Over the course of the next six hours the Contakt group go through various combinations of DJs. Troy Pierce starts with Gaiser who are then later joined by Heartthrob and Magda. Hawtin comes on and replaces Troy for a bit and plays solo for a while. Marc Houle comes on later on and there is just steady rotation. The overall sound of the set is basically Minus, tripped out techno sounds with abstract noises with a relentless and hypnotic groove. At points there were up to three or four DJs chipping into the combined set. But in all honesty I’m not really sure what they were doing, what they were chipping in or having any effect at all? To us it just sounded like a normal set, with different DJs coming and going. The entire performance seemed like an elaborate back to back session. It was no different to your normal Minus night. Marks for trying to come out with something different and unique but I feel it didn’t push the boundaries obviously enough. Its neither here or there between intricate DJ set or rehearsed live performance.

Despite my grumblings of an elaborate back to back set the whole six hours definitely kept EarPipe entertained. Hawtin did all the usual stuff including those filter out buzzy drops and dropping classics like Yekke Yekke. Gaiser ran through some of the twisted horse music off his new album to great effect. Troy Pierce, Marc Houle and Magda all chipped in to create an amalgamation of sound which saw a crowd stay strong well into Saturday morning as the sun rose. They even finished everyone off with a little blast of Techno Vocals before bringing the curtain down on it all, quite literally. We must also add that the visuals were pretty stunning for the whole event. The way they were worked in across all the LED screens to create one big canvas was quite amazing, and the actual visualisations went hand in hand with the music. Whoever did that I salute you sir.

So to sum up Contakt is an elaborate back to back that doesn’t add anything new. The music is still pretty good to party to and its not really any different from your normal Minus party.

Part 3 coming soon )

Tags: Contakt, Diplo, Gaiser, Heartthrob, Madness, Magda, Marc Houle, Minus, Report, Richie Hawtin, Sonar, Sonar 2008, Troy Pierce

1 Comment to The Sonar Report 2008 Part 2: EarPipe makes Contakt

Earpipe Looks Hazily Back at the Clubs, Festivals and Parties in 2008 | EarPIPE
January 3, 2009

[...] again for Sonar where we enjoyed ourselves so much we wrote three massive posts about it here, here and here. We also headed out to Germany to check out the Techno indoor festival monstrosity Timewarp [...]

Subscribe to Feed

EarPIPE

Smoke on the earPIPE of nonsense