It has now been a good ten years since techno and newer forms of electronic music began making their way into the mainstream canon. It has also been a good ten years since this movement, which for a long time played upon the ideology of a-historicity and the anti-narrativic, began writing its own history. Since then, the diffuse conglomeration of techno has become an important paradigm for present-day culture. Whereas formerly the talk was mostly of electronic art, for the most part socially isolated and technicistically orientated, in the past decade there have been far-reaching changes, and above all a contextual extension, tending towards an electronic culture. Many myths that once seemed to be central characteristics of this new field have since had to be revised. Authorlessness, anonymity, and the dehierarchizing of high and low are some of these myths, which have by no means ceased to be valid, but have certainly undergone some modifications. Electronic music today itself has a canon that is, to a large extent, unshakeable – after having once entered the field expressly in order to turn every form of canonization upside down.

The »agents« of this canonization are large-scale events like »Sonár,« the »Barcelona Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Arts,« which was held this year for the eighth time and whose own undeniable history can also be seen as a constant expansion – including numerous »recurrent phenomena.« This expansion has the concrete result that over 80,000 visitors were counted over three days and nights, a figure easily surpassed by large art exhibitions like the Documenta, if not in such a short space of time. Even »recurrence« does not necessarily need to be seen in a negative light, especially when those returning include forward-looking »old masters« like Jeff Mills or Richie Hawtin, who displayed their impressive live sets in the megalomaniac, almost surrealistic exhibition halls at Montjüic (where the night program was held) in front of about 10,000 people. But the fact that history has another, completely different meaning in this context was proven by the very open programming concept, which, for example, put the doyen of minimal music, Terry Riley, in the same concert series as the Californian sound-collage activist Ultra-Red (www.comagonse.com/ultrared); or juxtaposed the father figure of all radio DJs, John Peel, with the Berlin art minimalists from the Elektro Music Department (www.elektro.fm). Moreover, the old techno ideologem of absolute timeless relevance was made to seem still more questionable by the way in which the former Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, the eighties chanteuse Julee Cruise or Louie Austen, the bar singer who achieved an international reputation through the Viennese Cheap label, evoked widely separated decades and style histories.

So here was history recurring on many fronts; and precisely the admissive treatment of the uncontrolled, and often unexpected, simultaneity of asynchronous elements gives a festival like »Sonár« a quality that indirectly contributes to the real range of electronic culture becoming discernible. The fact that this range possesses not only historical dimensions, but also consists of countless synchronisms, was made clear in a further decentralization in the festival's line-up: a basic reorganisation of traditional music geography is becoming ever more apparent in electronic culture, which means that former centers like London and New York only appear to a limited extent on the newly forming map. »Sonár« also took this fact more into account, and presented, for example, showcases of the Norwegian label Rune Grammofon (www.runegrammofon.com), the Mexican Nortec scene (www.norteccollective.com), the Chilean label Condormusic (www.marciano.cl), or the Brazilian independent scene associated with SambaLoco Records (www.sambaloco.com.br). With acts like O Discurso and XRS Land, SamboLoco demonstrates how local atmosphere – in the first case on a rough bass drum/303 basis, and on a mellower drum'n'bass underlay in the second – today functions first and foremost as an ideational lubricant and less as a locationally dependent sound constant. During summer afternoons in the sun-drenched courtyard of the CCCB, where the daily events took place, the imaginary jump to a hybrid techno/exotic location very easily suggested itself, and the Argentinean Leo Garc'a (ww.fragildiscos.com) underscored this by breaking with two taboos: as someone who normally indulges in hard minimal techno in the isolation of Buenos Aires, he entertained the audience with self-composed Latino pop songs together with a singer/guitarist.

But, alongside this geographic decentralization, it is above all the breadth of context that gives electronic music its huge field of response today. This is something that »Sonár« is also taking more and more into consideration. Exhibitions, graphic design presentations, panels, web projects, a full-day film and video show, and a label trade fair are now normal ingredients in Sonár's comprehensive coverage of the techno combine. Even though one might at first have been disappointed by the fact that the thematic focus of the exhibition (»Invisible London«) was yet again the city of pop's heyday , this display nonetheless pointed up a wide variety of intersections between music production, graphic design, art projects, web activities and journalistic interests (»Invisible London« was put together by Anne Hilde Neset from the English music magazine »The Wire,«), which produced an enjoyable palimpsest. After all, that which the present-day attention economy does to excess daily is reflected all too clearly in the parallelism of electronic production - a parallelism scarcely comprehensible on a receptive level. The fact that excerpts and outlines have to suffice, especially since there are ever fewer finished or final electronic products, was something »Invisible London« made comprehensible in a spatially compressed form.

For example, the reconstruction of the Rough Trade Shop, now 25 years old and »overwritten« by numerous levels of very diverse independent movements, produced a walk-through graphics and product archive. Some design approaches that have shown their effectiveness in this area underline this: the group Intro (www.introwebsite.com), for example, whose sampling access plumbs a wide spectrum between digital gloss, DIY agitprop and unconventional CD packaging; or Jon Wozencroft, part owner and head designer at the Touch label (www.touch.demon.uk), whose color-filtered wide-angle landscape photos give an organic, warm spaciousness to Touch's often unwieldy sound dystopias; or the duo EkhornForss, which, in its redesign for »The Wire,« puts its money on serifless neo-modernity and sometimes packages CDs in vacuum cleaner bags. In contrast , an art project like Scanner's »Surface Noise 2.0)« (www.scannerdot.com) plays with the synthetic connectability of imaginary and real cartographies - in this case, of London – and the sounds that result from or can be associated with them: the city as a framework for variously overlapping feedback zones.

Jeff Mills emphasized with his two art projects the kind of roundabout confirmation of the modernistic canon, albeit in a reformed guise, techno culture is at present undergoing: the installation »Mono« presented the black monolith from Stanley Kubrick's »2001« amid cosmic ambient sounds in keeping with the time; his new soundtrack to Fritz Lang's »Metropolis« (shown as a video) goes one step further than the struggle for historicity – the historical content disappears to the same extent in which the texture of the »original« becomes a present-day sound addition. By which dissimultaneity once again shows itself to be a driving historical force.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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