Sónar: María Arnal transforms into Björk on the festival's big day for vocals

The voice, that instrument steeped in the future. Friday's Sónar demonstrated that the future will be humanistic, or it won't be at all. María Arnal, El Niño de Elche, and Tarta Relena captured all the attention. In a world shaped by artificial intelligence, the voice remains that freedom that expresses truth whether you like it or not. The ultimate proof was María Arnal's concert, where she knew how to utilize all the advantages offered by technology and AI to project the charm and mystery of her vocal timbre and multiply it across the audience's entire emotional spectrum.

The Catalan artist, accustomed to delving into the sounds of the past, has this time managed to double her approach, using generative AI, so that her voice becomes a thousand voices at once and creates an impressive harmonic polyphony. Suddenly, she transformed into Björk , based on a pop with millennial echoes and a staging as simple as it was evocative. With a robotic dance corps of five dancers dressed as maidens of the Roman Empire, the vocalist proved to be a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, but not on the rational and wild side, but on the traditional and futuristic side.

It's clear that María Arnal is looking to go one step further, and her ambition has opened Pandora's box. With a white screen behind her and a red light closing in on the stage, the show became a fascinating shadow theater that ranged from pop to folk to the most vibrant electronic music all at once. If this stage, the Hall, turned Rosalía into the authentic Rosalía , or Arca into the authentic Arca, last night María Arnal became the authentic María Arnal. Sónar creates monsters, and that's a fact.

The first big day of Sónar demonstrated that little has changed in its 32-year history . It's an intergenerational festival. All ages coexist. In fact, it seems that the Sónar audience hasn't renewed itself. You'd say most of them were already here for the first edition. It's clear that its audience is loyal. And the success is undeniable, because there are so many people, but for a festival that speaks of the future, of creativity and innovation, it's paradoxical that there are so few young people. Why? At least during the afternoon sessions and concerts, time seemed to have frozen in 1998.

In any case, young and old alike enjoyed themselves immensely. The first major concert was with El Niño de Elche and Refree . With their new project, 'cru+es,' they turned the Sónar Cómplex auditorium into a veritable pressure cooker. The heterogeneous singer's voice soared over layers of sound that continually broke apart, creating the soundtrack of devastation. Flamenco minimalism, or how to capture the essence of a style, blend it with melodies in the storm, and reproduce it until the end of time.

The set-up was simple. On one side, the producer with his sequencers, and on the other, the microphoned voice of El Niño rising and falling, delving into the hearts of all listeners. They left their audience in stitches when Refree picked up the guitar and the two sat together as if in a tablao. "My God, why have you forsaken me?" sang El Niño de Elche, as if he were Jesus Christ Superstar in the forest of Gethsemane. When will there be a deconstructed version of Andrew Lloyd Webber 's musical with El Niño de Elche in the role of Camilo Sesto?

"Ole!" shouted from time to time from an audience that filled the enormous auditorium to overflowing. A lullaby served to conclude one of those concerts, peaceful on the outside, but stormy and wild on the inside, as if hidden inside the magic lamp wasn't a genie, no way, but the emergence of a new universe. Perched on a box, El Niño de Elche sang once again to the abysses with a painful reverberation in beautiful and sad landscapes. The lament of the 21st century is heartbreaking, without a doubt, for it has no hope, only surrender. "Ah, my heart is running out of air," sighed the singer under faint, clear, spectral notes. In short, the concert seemed like a mass at the end of the world.

A little further on, in the Sónar Hall, after an efficient and snaking queue, Alva Noto and Fennesz's set began. Under a huge screen of psychedelic white light, so cold it froze your breath, the two artists delivered a furious electronic vindication of complex rhythms and infinite structures. "Is this a sound check?" asked a clueless member of the audience, with Fennesz—or was it Noto?—grabbing a guitar and suddenly shattering the entire cerebral and well-structured construction of their performance. A subtle nuance managed to lend depth to the symbiotic music, which got under your skin and made you believe you were Venom, at least. Sometimes they even played the opening of 'Blade Runner' with Vangelis' soundtrack, and you couldn't tell if you were human or a replicant. Excellent.

Right next door, on the Sonar+D stage, one of those unexpected surprises happened at the festival. Albert.Data took us inside his brain with a Brain Computer Interface. With the audience seated on the floor, and the noise amplified by their neural connections, multiple screens reproduced the thousand colors of an eye's iris. We don't know to what extent they showed the inside of the artist's head, but the effect was hypnotic.

Once again at the Sónar Complex , Tarta Relena 's vocals rang out under the sounds of rain, in something like roots music projected into eternity. With their arms raised and their libertarian spirit, this duo completely unsettled the audience, who were enchanted by a concert that deviated from the script of electronic noise or the festive house typical of Sónar. Emotional percussion, tribal chants, and a wealth of feeling for songs with one foot in the past and the other in the future.

Suddenly, they began speaking backwards, then reproduced their voices correctly, to everyone's surprise. The Catalans captivated with their ethereal songs , filled with earthy and worldly themes, like angels complaining about the weight of the air. "Despite the controversy, we live with pain from the genocide in Gaza. Funds like the KKR are stealing our cultural spaces, and we want to express our grievances. We hope that what happened sows a seed that will serve to rethink this model and seek new ways," they said to the applause of the audience.

At the Village, the place to dance and go wild, Honey Dijon used house classics like Hardrive's "Deep Inside" and the immeasurable B-52s to break stereotypes and seek the purest, most hedonistic party in the most direct electronic music. Tough, relentless, and relentless, the DJ would grab you and not let go, with inspiring visuals featuring women with illuminated ponytails that forced you to keep your eyes glued to the wall.

The main events of the evening were still to come, but the feeling was one of euphoria and triumph. People lined up at the exits, looking for the shuttle buses that would take them to Fira 2. And Saturday was still to come, with the guitars of Yerai Cortes, Actress, Nathy Peluso , and Eric Prydz.