MIRA Festival has been held for another year in Barcelona, bringing together a careful selection of references in electronic music and audiovisual and digital arts. Like every year, crossing the threshold of Fira Montjuïc means encountering a dazzling vision of the future, with immersive installations, performances, concerts and sessions that last until dawn.
After a first Friday day that featured outstanding performances by Nicolas Jaar, John Maus and Lechuga Zafiro + Verraco, Saturday brought together several of the main names.
The night started with two opposite poles. On the one hand, Erika de Casierthe Danish R&B singer, presented her new album, ‘Lifetime’, released in May. Accompanied only by her drums, Erika alternated the “quiet storm” atmosphere so enveloping of her new songs, such as ‘Delusional’, performed with shyness but joy, with the dance of her previous hits: a drum n’ bass remix of ‘Little Bit’ and ‘Bikini’, her dembow hit with Nick León, were played in succession.
After Erika’s warmth, Amnesia Scanner vs Freeka.tet They presented their joint show SLOTH and drilled the Vol Damm stage with their wild and twisted electronic rhythms.
The reunion with Oneohtrix Point Never It was special, since the artist had canceled his performance last year. Combining abstraction with atmospheres close to vaporwave, Daniel Lopatin offered a hypnotic journey through his sound catalog and presented the most fascinating visuals of the night. Faithful to that vaporwave aesthetic that characterizes Lopatin, the visuals were projected from an old Sony television, offering an infinite journey through different liminal spaces, including the cover of ‘R Plus Seven’ (2013), whose dimension and corners we were able to fully explore, provoking excited applause from the audience.
Flying Lotus He then deployed his muscular beats, offering a more danceable and house session than expected, without giving up his psychedelic style. The visuals, projected on two screens, one behind Steve Ellison and another in front, practically invisible, achieved a 3D and holographic effect, moving between the hallucination of ayahuasca and intergalactic travel. Euphoric in front of the mixing desks, Flying Lotus closed his performance by taking a selfie with the audience: it seemed like he didn’t want to leave. There were so many people that we had to watch the set from the side.
Back to DICE, the duo Pauk + Martina Ampuero presented VAC∅UM, an ‘audiovisual journey that narrates the lonely drift of an astronaut trapped in space, whose signals never find an answer.’ The elegant black and white visuals represented a warped and “glitched” version of nature, space and even childhood, while the thunderous IDM beats thundered with an almost warlike energy, nervous and expansive, making an attendee in the front row dance as if possessed.
blawan has released one of the most twisted electronic albums of the year, but his MIRA set took a slightly more conventional direction, opting for functional techno and house, albeit with little mystery. The best part of Blawan’s session was the visual aspect: what was projected on the screen was an explosion of vibrant geometries in motion. Straight and curved figures that merged with each other in a constant optical game. The eyes were spinning.
