SONAR 2008 REFLECTS INTERSECTION OF STYLES

The 15th Sónar Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art is alive and kicking in Barcelona. When? June 19, 20 and 21. This year Sónar takes the “female factor” as its starting point for showing the increasing feminisation of today’s electronic music.

Psychologists say that inside everyone, there is a masculine and feminine part. In the world of music, the female factor has been a strong and constant presence; opera divas, the muses of the grand masters, Mathilde Wesendonck. The imprint of popular music in history is considerably more widespread, but mothers have always sung to their children, young people have used dance as a weapon of seduction and old people have remembered their joys and loves with
old fireside love songs.

In modern music, classic DJs, such as Jeff Mills and Richie Hawtin have always known that women are the prime movers on the dancefloor. And let us not forget that it was records by a woman, Donna Summer, which broke down the barrier between dance music and the avant-garde.

It is no coincidence that the Sónar 2008 programme includes a significant number of female, feminist, and feminising artists and musicians. They are characters with different styles and origins, men and women with talent, ideas and daring, who are able to show their most sentimental and vulnerable side, which is traditionally and culturally associated with femininity. In artistic creation, none of that matters - femininity and masculinity come together and are combined, but it is easy to see that the female factor is a significant presence in the most entertaining, daring and innovative music today.

 1 | 2