Where anything goes

Jim Carroll checks out the latest hip-hop, tech-jazz and multimedia work at the Sónar Festival in Barcelona and finds plenty that's playful, inventive or dramatic.

The puppets have won. Saturday evening and a couple of thousand people are standing on the AstroTurf in front of the Sónar stage, cheering the hip-hop Punch and Judy show from Puppetmasterz. All we can see are five puppets - occasionally a rogue hand appears - but we can hear fine slamming hip-hop, albeit a little rough around the edges. As spectacles go, this Berlin ensemble has earned its 15 minutes of fame in the Barcelona sun.

It's not the only non-human activity to win word-of-mouth kudos at the 10th Sónar Festival. The queues to see Roland Olbeter's Soundclusters installation are proof that machines sometimes have all the best tunes. In a tiny room in the Centre de Cultura Contemporania, the city-centre venue that is Sónar's daytime home, is a robotic orchestra that Olbeter, a theatre designer, first assembled for a local company called La Fura dels Baus.

The four robots are ripping through electronic compositions by a rake of Catalan composers; the "guitarist" performs solos, the "drummer" makes a mighty rattle and the "brass" toot away. When a track ends the audience applaud but then stop, looking a little abashed at each other. Have the machines taken over? At Sónar, as always, anything goes.

Since 1994, the Barcelona International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art has been drawing the cream of innovators, trendsetters, early-adopters and weird haircuts to Barcelona for three days and nights of musical and multimedia delights. Between live acts, DJs, film screenings, concerts, exhibitions, installations and happenings that defy description, Sónar attempts to showcase what's coming down the line in electronic music and art.

Previous festivals were advance notices for the return of electro-pop and the arrival of indietronica, but it's hard to isolate a trend to represent 2003. There were valiant attempts to cater for hip-hop's onward growth. Appearances by the likes of Sage Francis and Sole from the hip US label Anticon showcased what happens when bleeps and electronica provide the musical backdrop, yet the rhymes were rather poor, demonstrating that most bleep-hop practitioners overlook hip-hop's verbal dexterity.

They should perhaps have taken the time to check out two films showing at SónarCinema. Tom Feiling's excellent Resistencia focused on how crews such as Cescru Enlace and Poetas de la Oscuridad reacted in their music to life in Colombia. From a Nietzsche-quoting Stormbob 75 to DJ Fresh explaining why he started break-dancing after seeing Flashdance, this was hip-hop at a coalface where paramilitaries, guerillas and government forces are likely to interfere violently with your lyrical flow.

For old-skool fans, Joey Garfield's Breath Control caught the eye. The history of the human beatbox from the Fat Boys and Doug E Fresh to Scratch and Rhazel from the Roots, it was a good- natured hoot, despite a rather pointless argument about who was first. Given that even Justin Timberlake can now beatbox with the best of them, it was a fine tribute to a hip-hop staple.

Another sound receiving plenty of attention was jazz - or, to be more precise, tech-jazz. The Scandinavians were present in force: both Jaga Jazzist and Kim Hiorthoy impressed on Saturday evening with their bugged-out jazzy symphonies, although the less said about the trying monotonal battering of Jazzkammer the better.

Bugge Wesseltoft, a name Irish audiences are becoming more familiar with, was the showstopper. The hypnotic, beguiling groove of the Norwegian's band sent spirits soaring. Fusing deep jazzy tones and micro-house notions, Wesseltoft's creative arc shows no sign of peaking. He also appeared with Laurent Garnier, previewing material the two artists will perform at next month's Montreux Jazz Festival.

Jazz of a different hue was provided by the Matthew Herbert Big Band at the first of two sold-out shows in the city's plush L'Auditori. A 16-piece band in tuxedos, three vocalists (including Arto Lindsay), a musical director and Herbert himself, with keyboards and effects, produced exhilarating snapshots from their Goodbye Swingtime album. Embellishing and occasionally bettering the adventurous sounds of that album, especially when they tore up copies of ABC newspaper and sampled the sound, it was a musical performance whose innovation and charm stopped you in your tracks. This was jazz reinvented.

Although the setting aided Herbert, it hampered Björk's Friday-night performance at the Fira Gran Via. Her current musical blend demands sympathetic acoustics and intimate spaces, not a cavernous warehouse. That 15,000 people paid to see the Icelandic singer is probably a commercial justification for the use of the venue, although it was at the expense of her music being lost to the rafters. A pity, because with a string quartet and producers Mateo and Matmos on board, this was Björk stretching her sound.

The night-time events took most flak from festival-goers this year, indicating that Sónar is finding it difficult to cope with its popularity. Since 2001, when it switched its night-time events from a seaside setting to the rave-like Gran Via, in the middle of the city's industrial area, the festival has found that more and more people are forgoing the nightly trek, preferring to concentrate on Sónar's daytime sounds and sights, as well as city-centre fringe events.

For multimedia thrill-seekers it was a good year. Curated by Jordi Costa, Cultura Porqueria was a fascinating look at society´s obsession with trash culture. From the Barnum & Bailey exhibitions of Nature's Mistakes to the TV trash of Big Brother and Hotel Glam, it took in Margaret Keane's sad, naive paintings, the gimmicky cult movies of Ed Wood, William Castle and Armando Bo and the cultural lure of serial killers.

When it came to music, it chose to concentrate largely on outsider-music-makers such as The Shaggs, Heino and Daniel Johnson.

It would have been nice had it touched on the serious trash and kitsch inspirations behind much of the electropop sounds and fashions to be found at Sónar 2003, but perhaps this would have been an ironic bridge too far.

But it always comes back to the music at Sónar. The wobbly grooves of Patrick Pulsinger, the jump-up euphoria of Fabio's drum and bass set, the childlike playfulness of Safety Scissors, the inventive Bill Frisell-like soundscapes of David Grubbs, the dramatic sonic vision of Jamie Lidell, the serene, chilled electronic sweep of Pulseprogramming: for a couple of days and nights music really did sound a whole lot better in Catalonia. Many are already planning a return trip for 2004.