Sight, Smell, & Sónar

On the way home from work, finding a colleague in the ditch, then falling witness to a stranger’s van roll over in front of us, grounded me in current reality. These crystalline winter teeth bit into my ass as a token of the season’s irrevocable arrival. Ice on the asphalt, and ruptured glass, prompted me to long for a season’s trappings so unlike winter’s and yet a stone’s throw from recent memory.

     Festival de Sónar 2011. Thursday the 16th, Friday the 17th, and Saturday the 18th. June. 160 Euro. Hot. Barcelona.

1. Why am I going to a music festival solely dedicated to electronic music?

2. Why should I pay an exorbitant fee to enter when I have only heard of two people in the program?

3. Is this a good idea?

1. I went because it smelled of insanity.

2. I only heard of two people on the program because the festival showcases the underground, the avant-garde, and the unsigned instead of catering to the masses who have only heard of M.I.A. and Aphex Twin because of music videos and youtube.

3. Yes, this is the definition of a good idea.

The Sónar fest this year melted over Barcelona's summer scene like so many other wax candles on Europe's festival ridden sidewalks, spreading out with heat to fill in the cracks on an already solid base. Sónar by Day sweltered in the Catalonian sun and Sónar by Night swam in the coastal night. If a person can handle it, a wristband gives access to 46+ hours of advanced music and media over a period of 3 days. Cinema, demonstrations, multimedia art, the avant-garde, and the obvious presence of music all spin Sónar’s turbines. The festivalgoers feed off this energy like spawning salmon circling magnetic fields.  People don’t walk at Sónar; they dance. We danced in the beer queue, the bathroom queue, while moving from stage to stage, sitting down to take a break, all while witnessing the DJs’ rhythms spiral out of the turntables.  Even as we exited the festival to scour pizza out of an Argentinean restaurant, newly developed involuntary muscles jerked our feet and hips to rhythms.  Movements, archaic to the point of latching onto our genetic memory until our bodies refused to yield, continued to release without cerebral prompt.

Before sheltering inside the festival, we arrived in Barcelona at about 5 a.m. on a bus from Bordeaux, France. After a breakfast of coffee and bocadillos (small submarine sandwiches), we checked into the hostel and collapsed.  It took several hours to roust, meet the coeds in the room, down a light lunch of rum, and grab our tickets. Thanks to a clerical error, we managed to get one extra ticket for free which we promptly grafted for booze money. After finding the perfect plaza off of Barcelona’s Ramblas we slurped down cola and rum with a generous helping of ice.
 Spain reigns as the most hospitable European country for Canadians due to its belief in ice as a virtue; bags of it glitter in supermarkets’ humidity. We did not make it inside the festival until 5 p.m. missing the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra and the much-hyped Hiroaki OBA. Upon entering Sónar by Day’s venue, however, we were swept into a world of madness.

Ninja Tune & Big Dada threw out lances of vibration into the crowd. Everyone shook and writhed on the Astroturf, victims of the scratch pads. I sought to understand the attraction to these sounds. At first I found it difficult to get my head around the appeal. Once I relaxed, and stopped thinking, I realized the body reacted first and the brain followed suit. The synthetic noises turned on and tuned a primal pleasure that I had only experienced in drum circles. Drum circles wake the body and ease the mind into a bass massage. Electronic music seemed to entice the ears and parietal lobe with treble and electricity, then assault the body with the same repetitious rhythms of a drum circle. This realization drenched me within the first 3 minutes of entering the SónarVillage stage.

            Sónar by Day continued in this fashion, girls jolted into curves like an electric eel’s hustle while boys popped like beans off hot sand. We soldiered on until hunger overtook us and we left the site to find food. Down the side streets of the Ramblas, Barcelona’s most infamous kilometer, we found a paradise of cheap beer and Argentine pizza. The staff took a liking to us and became interested in the costumes we developed throughout the day. At their core, the costumes consisted of liquor-stained shirts and oversized spectacles. In retrospect, they must have marveled at our overwhelming dirt-bag appearance. After a lot of schmoozed cigarettes, and a pizza each, I blacked out.

My eyes opened as my companions drug me from the backseat of a cab. Our 2 Italian roommates in the hostel apparently tipped us off about a party on the beach and they were to blame for the charming coastal locale we stumbled onto, an oil refinery. Stacks studded with red lights stood before us and a pungent steam escaped from the tops of the towers.

“They’re going to let us get drunk in there?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” Lucas said pointing towards some white tents, “over there.”

Perhaps the contrast of the tents to the towers brought my excitement to a more mediocre level. Once a person believes they will be inebriated inside an oil refinery, it becomes difficult to console the sense of disappointment when that person discovers they will be drinking overpriced drinks from a very average tent instead. For an exaggerated fee of 30 euros each, we got inside the snow-fenced compound. For a fee of 4 euros, each patron received a 200ml capacity cup. For 5 euros, beer or water filled the cup. After the first 5 minutes of the party I felt like leaving. Prefabricated music droned among a 3-note scale while partygoers bopped inside the glorified playpen. The snow fence prevented anyone from escaping to the beach. Security ensured that everyone made use of the 5 port-a-potties instead of the shrubs, choke-slammed anyone caught pushing the giant inflatable balls, or people caught having a good time. After all, since inflated plastic may cause harm to ecstasy engrossed ravers; security must consider any gentle bounce an extreme offence. Like a child who enters a friend’s birthday party expecting cake, but only receives deliberate spanking, I felt unwelcome. After finding my posse, I convinced them to leave this fascist-themed internment.

The moment we left, a drunken wanderer arrived in the parking lot carrying 4 liters of cold water. After paying 4 euros for 200 milliliters inside the concentration camp, we all offered copious amounts of change (the only currency we had left) for the water. The Yankee fella’ politely refused, and gave us a bottle for free, after pointing us in the direction of the party we had been looking for all along. 350 meters down the sand, beyond the red pepper of the refinery’s lights, a fiesta heaved with happy people all about the beach. The affair fluoresced over the water’s edge, delivering moths from every cold corner the heavens offered into the warmth of its sand strung dance floor.

Salesmen sprung from every corner of the trail. They pushed meat pastries, sausages, beer, and a cornucopia of drugs on us on the way down to the crowd. Each pusher had the same pitch, but in a different order: “Cerveza? Sandwich? Marijuana? Bocadillo? MDMA? Chorizo? Whiskey? Cocaine?” These solicitors stocked up their tea cabinets before the festival and had every spice in Asia on display. We grabbed a couple beers and turned down the other offers, we figured they would still be around the next night. The gathering proved worthy of the wait. Gorgeous girls from every country in the world bounded through the boardwalk in little more than beach clothes. We met a thousand smiling faces and nearly drowned in beer for a full half hour before the bar closed.

My colleague had gotten busy wheeling a tall, English, Kung-Fu lawyer, and convinced me to come along with him to chase after her and her posse to a club. I didn’t have any other plans, so I went along for the ride and passed out in another taxi for a while. The cab lurched to a stop in front of Rzzmtzz, a mammoth sized club as loud, smelly, and sweaty as any pissed off Musk-Ox.

A bouncer at the door informed us that the club closed in 30 minutes—things do eventually close in Barcelona—and we needed to pay 15 euros to enter. I refused to pay in my stubborn belligerence. My comrade paid the way, as he had a hankering for some English breakfast. A basement of bathrooms and three floors of dusty dance space cast in red Christmas lights greeted us. If these people we came to find were inside, they weren’t on any floor at the same time we were. We did find about ten toilets with plumbing issues that turned them into swirling fountains; my vision began to match the motion of their water. I followed the glowing streak of my friend’s overpriced shirt up and down a labyrinth of staircases until he came to terms with reality. We got in a cab and headed back to the hostel defeated, and ready for 1000 years of sleep.

For the time being 3 hours of rest would have to do. As it turned out, those 3 hours would be the longest sleep I’d have for the rest of the weekend. I peeled myself out of bed at 11:00 a.m. to renew my cot for the day, an hour late.  After a cold reception from the host I accused of being a vampire the night before, I managed to pay for another night after several failed pin entries. I returned to the room where the rest of the Sónarians remained unconscious and joined them for another hour. When the rest of the crew felt motivated enough we showered off and headed to the café for an overdose of coffee and bocadillos, our new-found dependency.

Thank God we made it to the festival grounds by 3:55p.m, 5 minutes before the Sewing Machine Orchestra began. This, all after: donning some strange attire, a few slices of Argentinean pizza, 3 beers each, and nearly polishing 26ozs of rum. As we came through the gate at Sónar by day’s entrance we met some interesting security. Ben, in his drunken glory, mumbled through without a hitch. Lucas glided past, with a few winks, catching a little friction for his French accent. In my broken Spanish, I tried to charm my way through the line-up and look as pleasant as possible, which isn’t that easy when you sport a mullet. All was well, I acquired a wristband and my bottle of rum & coke remained secure on my belt, until a bald man with scissors, a Billy club, and hand cuffs asked me what I was doing with a bottle at my side.

“It’s soda.” I answered with a smile.

“Well,” he exaggerated the vowel, “I’m sure it’s only soda, but I’m afraid it could be used to hurt some one.”

“What? How?”

“As a blunt object.” He stared at my eyes while his deadpan retort splashed over me.  He tapped the bottle repeatedly in his palm as I pleaded with him.

“Please Sir, allow me to finish the contents of the bottle here so it will no longer pose a threat to anyone now, or in the future.”

“Ok, Ok.”

“Ben! Lucas! I need your help over here!” I popped the top of the bottle and began to guzzle the sweet liquor down. My amigos had to pass back through the next line of enforcers and began to pitch in. A few guards began to protest at my friends’ involvement but they complained too late. The rum vanished, the bottle confiscated, we marched into the next brigade. Ben and Lucas went through, but I did not. Another guard stopped me, pulled out his scissors, and grabbed my hand. I thought I was about to lose my wristband, but he stopped short at my thumb.

“Which one should we keep?” He asked his buddies as he flitted the blades around my fingers.

“Take my ear, the hands are innocent without a trial.” Luckily, he laughed, slapped me on the back and let me through. My cadre looked on in disbelief, suggested I should complain, then laughed at the new cola stains on my shirt. In no mood to bitch, we waded through the anarchy into a fog laden indoor venue.

The Sewing Machine Orchestra drew the crowd in early. Though the dim room carried a matt of haze, we managed to stick out with our novelty sunglasses, and Lucas’s Minnie Mouse ears. Past Lucas’s headgear, I could make out 8 classic Singer sewing machines. Each one dangled a plethora of wires to the floor like ivy from Barcelona’s balconies to the sidewalk. The crowd looked at one another expecting some kind of explanation, but their blank faces proffered none.
Martin Messier coasted onto the stage, stone-faced, and began to rattle out a rhythm like a Chicago typewriter. Sonic bullets ricocheted across the room. Some of the audience wondered whether to stay or not. Then another machine illuminated the atmosphere as Messier zigzagged the cacophony into an electric chorus. Each thread Messier tweaked made the sound waves of his tapestry tense into clearer tones. This totally original arrangement reminded one of a homemade Telharmonium. The incredible tonnage inundated with hundreds of spinning dynamos and kilometers of cable all replaced with a collection of sewing machines.

            We left the performance enlightened, though a little confused and thirsty.  We found a stage drenched in sunlight and outfitted with Astroturf perfect for dancing and dissipating spilt beer. We hip-hopped around and everyone we talked to felt like making friends. Some say that citizens of the Catalan province can be a bit cold.  We didn’t find any evidence of that for the duration of the weekend. I spoke the three words of Catalan I could and everyone was amiable, even the U.S. tourists we met. We got surprised with a few Limp-Bizkit covers and decided to look for a bathroom.

            Lines upon lines of people stood in front of port-a-potties in various locales but our intuition pressed us into a media centre. Orange laptops hummed on pristine white tables all over the room. Only this building, of all the others, had the characteristic of being immaculate. Gorgeous coastal sun filtered through the glass façade, which permitted a view of the chaos outside. People ran, danced, stumbled and waltzed back and forth outside. My Mad Hatter inspired sunglasses had become looser and looser upon my head all morning. When I managed to find the bathroom past a few randomly placed security guards, I ducked inside. In my hung-over state I leaned a little too far forward against the urinal. My glasses slipped off of my nose like overripe grapes separating from the vine and crashed into the urinal just as it flushed. I snatched the glasses up as the liquor blunted my rational to toss the pair away:

“I know the vendor doesn’t have any more like it and there’s too much plastic floating around in the gyre nowadays anyway. By using half a sack of soap these should be ship shape in no time. The bell that wedged itself under the urinal cake can stay though.”

After a good scrub the glasses made their way back onto my face and no one the wiser, until now. Back in the media centre we hijacked a few computers and told everyone we knew around the world, who wasn’t there, that they should be there. Beside me sat a group of Castilians who jeered at passersby on the other side of the glass.

            I managed to ignore the heckling for the most part while typing my emails as fast as humanly possible. At one point I realized that Ben was asleep on a stool nearby and Lucas had disappeared. A glance in the other direction revealed that the group of people beside me had managed to taunt a guy and a girl to the window, who began to dance. We all started to hoot and cheer as their dance progressed in a liberal direction. The cameras came out when the girl removed the lollipop from her mouth and jammed it into her boy’s. She lifted her leg onto the windowsill and pulled back her skirt. Retrieving the lollipop, she began to drag it from her ankle up to her knee. Her boy promptly followed the lollipop’s trajectory and began to lick the residue off. She moved the candy into a region we couldn’t see from our angle, but which the boy obviously could as his head disappeared from view. By this time, nearly everyone at our table had rolled off the bench laughing. I woke Ben up with a slap as the dancers camouflaged into the crowd. It didn’t take long to convince him that we were missing out.

            We rolled out of the media centre and left the glass façade behind for the real thing. On the way through the seething masses to find Lucas we came across a unicorn that convinced its owners to take off their pants, shirts and shoes to dress it. As we got closer to the half-naked revelers, they asked for my sunglasses. They came fresh from the urinal so it didn’t seem like a bad idea to hand them over. I’d questioned my hygiene for a while now, and it seemed like the best home for the glasses. After a few photos, I got jealous of the unicorn and had to take my glasses back. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone with cleanliness anyway. It wouldn’t be the last time the unicorn made an appearance. Sometime close to this point a guy began to wave, to whom he waved remained vague until I noticed his shirt. It held a massive fried egg graphic upon it just as mine did, identical except for the black background, which held the egg in place. I began to approach then realized that despite my shirt’s opposite colour, he may be a doppelganger. Even in a benign form, such a person could prove dangerous. Without proper medical coverage my decision swayed to avoid this mysterious character. The beer began to wear off but powered through the camp.

            Like zombies that just spent a month fasting, we trudged into a tent where we spotted Lucas’s Minnie Mouse ears and shuffled our way over to him. We split a liter of beer to keep us going and danced our legs off. We lost Lucas before too long but kept up with the DJ. His ears reappeared sometime later, and as his face emerged, so did lipstick and whiskers. We had been outdone and this would not stand.

The three of us pushed through the human forest and into a makeup demonstration tent. Girls fettered stars, curlicue moustaches, and whiskers all over us while Minnie touched up her widow’s peak. The attention didn’t hurt, and the whole experience was pretty easy on the eyes. Someone stopped us on our way out; at first we thought we had encroached upon a gender specific area. The man took out his camera and gave us a balloon that read, “Where the Fuck is Neverland?” We posed happy to advertise for a semi-fictitious vacation locale.

After a couple hours of grooving around the site, we realized that no amount of coffee could motivate our limbs. We headed back to the hostel for a few winks and stopped at the pizza place on the way. A little more energy grabbed our gullets as the price of beer decreased for us. We’d made an impression on the staff and were reaping the rewards. A couple of Columbian girls chatted us up over pizza, and soothed our eyes for a while as well. After making the other patrons uncomfortable with our loud and increasingly annoying antics we relieved them of our presence.

            No more than 5 minutes into lying down on our beds did the 2 sprightly Italian girls walk in the door. My cadaverous companions became much more alert and jovial than the members of the undead they typified only moments before. We introduced ourselves and started drinking more beer. I fell asleep at some point and woke up near 12:00 p.m. to 2 Canadian girls flirting with the posse. After some cheese and beer I tried to convince my friends and the Italians that we should leave in order to get to M.I.A. before her show finished. Everyone agreed but no one got off his or her asses. During my absence my friends had moved in on all the girls and we’re having trouble deciding which one(s) to pursue. In my opinion they both should have picked an Italian each because the pair had Sónar passes. This would reduce the chances of missing a show due to following their cocks around. Sometimes having an absentee girlfriend keeps you on track. I abandoned ship and took the metro line as close as I could to the Sónar by Night venue. While I searched for the next bus a few English fellows pointed me in the right direction. One was on holiday from studying for his PhD in electronic music. What an educated crowd this rabble of drunken trance dancers could turn into. Escaping from the routine of work and school, every guest of Sónar reveled in the impossibility of experiencing every performance and display. Instead of an overload of stress, deadlines, and work, we dealt with an overload of light, sound, joy, and energy. Some attendees came to escape while others seemed to live at Sónar their entire lives. After we boarded the bus we stood in different areas. They ended up alone and I ended up with a fellow Sónarian. Certainly the weirdest dude I met during the festival. He hailed from the island of Mallorca, which lays just south of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. He bore a pencil thin mustachio, which, along with his nostrils, showcased an obvious film of cocaine. He rambled that he too b-lined for M.I.A. “Oh joy,” I thought, “now how the hell do I get rid of you?” By sheer luck, after dodging his spit and insane cultist agenda, he got off at the wrong stop. He begged me to tag along and informed me that I was making a mistake. I pressed on without him and joined the English amigos at the next stop. Luckily they knew where we were headed as we walked past a building inspired by Swiss cheese and into the SónarClub.

     We caught M.I.A. halfway through her set as she stood in front of us with all her anarchistic glory. She had started late, thank fuck. She dictated doctrine from her power podium and disguised her semantics—to overthrow the government, throw up the middle finger, and set fire to all of the cash we could find—inside a veil of hip-hop. I have to say that her campaign was more convincing than most. Caring little for her own safety, she occasionally scaled the stacks of speakers to spit from a higher altitude. Security worked overtime to prevent the audience from rushing the stage and to keep the stacks upright as they wobbled under M.I.A.’s might. The audio sounded like it had been set up by a gaggle of odd job nihilists, but her set list managed to make the crowd sweat. The set list selected the best of Piracy Funds Terrorism to MAYA and pressed steam from the amps without a seam. Each track dove into the last to create a single hour-long mash-up. An assault of laser and strobe lights hit the cue on Paper Plane’s pistol blasts. Her hype people threw their nets into the crowd and hauled a herring’s net worth of people onto the stage until security culled it. The White unicorn, who had

donned my shades, emerged from the on-stage gaggle and hopped up and down until the very last track. M.I.A. threw her podium down a set of stairs, thanked the crowd, and fucked off. Awesome!

            Thinking I could catch Dizzee Rascal at the SónarPub I lurched towards the stage. Originally scheduled to overlap, the show was said and done. M.I.A.’s lack of tardiness helped me make her show, but I lost out on Dizzee’s performance. Bummer. A series of events involving icicle lights led me to lose the other bell from my glasses, bricolage them with beer can tabs, dance with some Vietnamese girls, and turn around to find Lucas grinding up behind everybody: all this action possibly themed to the falsetto of Katy B and her hype man.

A knock from behind sent my fashionable glasses to the floor and a lens shot off into the shuffle. I recovered the glasses inside a crowd of ladies impressed with, what could only have been, my impeccable appearance. Though pretty, I perceived the girls in two different colours at the same time. After a few dance combos I left the shape-shifting
sirens to find Lucas. Memories, from this point on, play dodgeball with oily blobs of amnesia and balloons printed with the phrase: “Where the Fuck is Never Land?” It occurred to me that we had found Never Land, though in its ephemeral form. The search for permanency would have to continue later though. At this point our friend Ben began to look for us after he had gotten himself into a mix with some Canadian girls, at the hostel, and stressed their friendship in the classical way.

      To Ben’s disadvantage, by the time we received any kind of call, we transcended more than one dimension to Aphex Twin’s laser therapy and stewed our senses in every other stage on the circuit. Ben’s text message asked to meet us at the front of the main stage. Since no stage went by the name of “main” we assumed Aphex Twin would have taken this position. Shafts of light spun through the spectrum and twirled the audience into Aphex Twin’s personal school of T-Shirted goldfish (Aphex Twin on the "Main" Stage). Looking at everything through a set of eyes stolen from a pirate ship’s jester contributed to this fantasy. The missing lens in my shades distorted my vision and offered a filtered, and unfiltered version of whatever dimension I had entered. I took no preference. Since Ben intended to situate the rendezvous at the front of the stage we found a lot of stoned fish swaying inside their own glass barrels instead of Ben, who – at that point – may as well have been a fish swaying inside a glass barrel.

The lower half of my body told me to sit the fuck down, and the upper half of my eyelids found themselves encased in lead that by some alchemy turned to gold when they met the lower eyelids. I took Lucas’s phone and punched out some text messages to Ben.

“Meet me here.”

But where am I? A look around gathered that I had found myself in a lobby supported by metal trees. The forest extended in a great distance, either way, in a linear fashion.

     “Underneath the trees made of metal.”
Couples, newfound and established, gathered here to experience the same spell I fell under. Many solo Sónarians sprawled out onto the concrete floor to rest awhile as well, then rose as zombies to stagger off and feed. This scene provided the backdrop for 3 pairs in particular. Kissing as if to take advantage of this moment in the brief prelude to infinity—stood Girls—engulfed in the act before the world announced it passé. Not the type of make-out session prompted by someone’s new camera, naivety, youth, and a substantial amount of alcohol, but the type of kiss that happens when two people realize a mutual attraction, obsess over lines in the face, jewels found in the eyes, tremble over the upturned corners of the mouth, wish to blanket their hands with the other’s hair, and capitalize on the moment. These girls were lost in a passion that surpassed inhibition, and overcome with the desire to press their manicured lips upon the other’s. A sight so profound, beautiful, and natural containing the serendipity to happen all around me, that it would obviously suffice to describe a location.

     “By the girls making out with each other.”

     Ben never showed. Lucas felt the same alchemy as I did after a while. He poked me awake on the way out.

     The crowd began to thin towards the end of the metallic forest corridor. We noticed a stand with posters overlapped around it that displayed various drugs found at the festival, their properties, their unwanted & desired side effects, and aliases. An educational situation. While attempting to memorize the appearance of soul-crushing, brain-rupturing pills, an odor pulled at my nose and led us out the door where the sparse people bottlenecked, then diverted to reveal a masterpiece of efficiency. A makeshift BBQ stand erected from cardboard boxes, pieces of corrugated plastic and spindly metal legs stood before us. As if Henry Ford sprang a charcoaled assembly line in front of us, a huddle of Pakistani men and women: cut meat, spread sauce, chopped onions, stoked coals, flipped sausages, sliced buns, collected money, and passed the product. Failing to purchase a giant kielbasa, smothered in caramelized onions, became my biggest regret of the entire weekend. After distance from the grill prevented sausage angels from dancing in my nose, Lucas took it upon himself to shove us onto a bus that took us somewhere closer to the hostel. What felt like years went by as the sun rose, and before my head hit the comfort of a rented pillow.

            I awoke after a period of time that could not have exceeded the previous night’s rest of 3 hours. I felt worse that the day before, and once again I woke an hour past checkout time. My friend in Barcelona had still not contacted me to say whether or not I could crash at his pad. I walked down the thousand stairs to the desk and waited in line for a bed, leaving an odor of stale beer and limp sweat in my wake. The cot I had just risen from had been sold out from under me, and my new location would be on the 2^nd floor, thank God. I made my way to the new digs and met my roommates. An extremely happy duo performing a chain-reaction of high 5s greeted me with grins. The two were in an admirable state of bliss, but I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping anytime soon. After a transfer of equipment, a shower with the sink’s soap dispenser, and a roust of my comrades, we set out to satisfy our lust for coffee and bocadillos. Ben regaled us with his version of the previous night’s events and Lucas charged off to the festival. Ben and I decided to redeem ourselves in the Sagrada Familia Basilica before he departed to Paris with sadness. He never did see any ladies making out in Barcelona. The poor bastard didn’t charge his phone, oh well; more girls will feel the same way in the future. The basilica lifted our spirits and opened our minds to an architectural world outside of boxes, rectangles, and bromidic real estate moguls. We were ready for the day. Ben may have had fun on his obligatory visit to Parisian relatives, but he should have delayed it a day.

            Volunteers and security met me with recognition and without trouble. My legs hesitated a little before they rocked and rolled into the mix. The bartender informed me that, no, they did not serve coffee so I got 3 beers instead. Lucas turned up all dolled up in his Minnie Mouse guise and found a girl who shared his taste for wearing multiple pairs of sunglasses. My hands passed a beer into his when I remembered that Ben had left the country. I decided to double fist the beverages. Off to the right a crowd of part-time paparazzi formed. A dancing baby mesmerized the onlookers as she busted twirls upon a glass ceiling, which rose from the concrete. A future superstar in the making, she then succumbed to shyness among the hoots and hollers of encouragement. Before inquiring upon a
contract, or rights, to the child’s entertainment future, we moved on to the tented, SonarDôme, stage. Lucas raved about it earlier in the day, and for good reason. Push-button DJ, David Rodigan, fired out his dub selection, hollered the crowd on, and everybody danced. Someway, somehow we found the joules to jump some more. Irresistible rhythm coursed through the party’s nerves. The DJ proved that Sónar doesn’t stop just because you do. The Electric Wire Hustle came on afterwards and put on a decent set that could only run half the amps Rodigan had just sweat. My batteries needed a charge. I cursed myself for not getting to the grounds quicker and wished the group luck on attempting to impress anyone who caught the last show.

Lucas and I left, then went about gathering rum, ice, and coke. The once erroneous task flowed naturally; our minds had been trained to ascertain the location of every item and ask the right questions in the correct language. After picking up some falafels, more beer followed at the Argentine pizzeria with warm welcomes and friendly reminders detailing our level of debauchery the last time we entered. A short walk took us to the plaza that led us into the drunken state we felt so familiar with. The rum caressed our tongues underneath the Catalan sun. At times, the meaning of life appears as clear and strong as the savory odour of sun-dried tomatoes, drooping from windowsills, staggered down a boulevard, caught in high noon’s light. At that moment every pore of my skin felt satisfied: saturated with vitamin D. My mind dilated and let everything in, all senses pounding the pistons of my cerebrum. Love, share, be free, and dance.

            At this moment a skinny blonde kid sat near us and asked for a light. We had none. A salesman interrupted the query and solicited us some beer. At first I said no. Then Lucas asked me:

            “Are you sure?” Rubber arms twisted, we consented and asked for a beer.

            “1 euro, por favor.” We were about to pay and offered no rebuttal since this stood as the standard price of, chilled, black market beer.

            “You’re a fucking crook you Pakistani motherfucker.” Interrupted the blonde gaunt.

            “If you don’t like my beer you don’t have to have one.” Answered the gentleman.

            “Those beers are 30 cents or less at the super market. You’re a crook.”

            “And you’re a cheap son-of-a-bitch. I tell you…” turning his attention to us, “I’ll give you two beers for 60 cents each.” We obliged and gave thanks while the kid looked on in disgust. “And if you want sex, it’s free. No charge for sex.”

“What?” We couldn’t help but choke on his proposal.

“I’m an old man! All sex is good sex! With me, it’s always free. Anytime you see me, free sex!” We rolled around the bricks and laughed in spilling beer. After we refused his offer we returned to our beverages and saw him saunter off towards new customers.

            “Fucking con artist.” commented the kid.

            “I’d pay full price to that guy any day…” I paused, “for beer.” Lucas laughed at me, then the kid started in too. “Ok, you got me there. Just relax man, he’s not a millionaire mastermind of the black market beer business.”

            The rest of the conversation went nowhere, but we hoped the dried bean where his heart should have been would soften and spread in Barcelona’s heat as ours had. We left the plaza one last time to return to the festival, lasso the sun, and ride it well below the horizon.

            A period of darkness consumes the remainder of Sónar by Day. Hazy memories of what may have been a nap, and the familiar Swiss Cheesed sheet metal skin of Sónar by Night’s venue, offer the only clues to what may have happened between the afternoon and when we made it indoors to the sight of surgical laser lights razing the air around us. It took the sight of SonárCar to light up my neurons and smolder my memory into recording again.

            A carnivalesque structure, that provided a holistic strobe light, saturated our corneas. The DJ provided a thwomp that pushed us into the middle of the arena where a miraculous square of neon tubes fenced in a brigade of psychotic bumper cars (Follow This Link).  Lucas paid the boatman 3 Euros in exchange for some pink plastic discs, and we crossed the river Styx. The arena occupied a space unlike any scene from my childhood where parents told their children not to drive too fast, or where the carnie warned of exiting the bumper car before all the cars had come to a stop. Drunken lunatics, escaped from society and looking dangerous, ran between the cars at random as if to imitate rocket powered pylons. I hollered P.S.As of hedonism and road rage as we rammed into every object we could. When the sparks above found their leaps muted, and the occult machine had its fill of plastic discs and spilt beer, we rambled on; at least I did, Lucas may have walked. We grooved at every stage we found for at least as long as it took to lose complete track of time and space. Once again, minutes melted into each other then pooled on the floor where my shoelaces drug the puddle into long strings behind me. Stages appeared and disappeared. Stages I had missed the previous day inserted themselves between the ones I had left pieces of my brain in.

Upon a Reversi backtrack of the labyrinth, I heard a clip that brought me to my knees. At an electronic music festival, someone decided to sample The Yardbirds. “Holy Fuck!” Lucas had gone. I found myself alone among hundreds of confused androids that couldn’t conceive of this music being created on a computer. The Gaslamp Killer began to plunder his vinyl vaults and pillage our ears, feeding off our reactions (The Gaslamp Killer Performs). 42 hours into the festival, I found the tooth missing from the saw. Sónar had now cut directly through my skull and popped its top off. My cerebral sponge soaked up the plethora of jittered nuances seeping from the stage. The DJ cued pyrophonics over his wild beats then smothered the turntables’ black lacquer with a bomb of dust-mop hair.
Smitten with symphonic cacophony, I danced like a cat in love with the moon. It appeared that only a few hundred Sónarites shared this compassion for the unexpected. This scattered crowd collapsed into magma of misdirection; their dance reflected an anarchism of divine thieves aswarm in their own loot. The throng heeled from jumping up and down and instead found themselves encased in individual glee. The magnetism of this event enthralled me to imbibe even the very last note the Gaslamp Killer allowed to exit his dictatorship of decibels. Sad to see the lights go out over the Afro that commanded webs of sine waves, I felt like going outside. As luck would have it, the tour Lucas and I took revealed an entire outdoor stage. I fled the scene to this marvelous occasion.

            Monoliths illuminated before me. A head and shoulders rose above the linear lines. Computerized innuendos ordered lights of red and purple to warp into blue. Paul Kalkbrenner began to call the shots (Paul Kalkbrenner On Stage). A sound, both sincere and whimsical, wafted from the stage. Instead of a pulsating wall of that slammed against our chests, the air massaged the audience onto our feet and got us dancing again. A girl behind me caught my attention.

“I like your style.” She said in an accent I couldn’t place.

“The dancing, or the get-up?” I asked. She shrugged.

“Where are you from?”

“Silver Valley. And you?”

“The stars.” She replied as her finger indicated the open sky.

“I had you pegged for the moon. Not so far away.” Though the stars seemed a reasonable answer at the time. A purple blob appeared nearby. It jumped up and down, up and down, with mouse ears. “Lucas!” He had returned from his own adventure to bask in the same space odyssey I had found. Once again, “Where the Fuck is Neverland?” cameras rose from the crowd of freshly evolved humans. We danced over an hour with people from various points in the universe, and would continue to do so for the rest of our lives. At some point the magic came to a halt and we made our way outside.

This time the makeshift BBQ had been quashed and replaced with security guards. We shuffled on to a line of buses with crushed spirits. Lucas waited around and worked his magic with some skinny ladies while I chased down a sandwich off a guy selling them from a box. I bought it for 2 euros, bit into it, then realized that ants occupied half of the sandwich’s ingredients. This became the low point of the festival. Though some cultures have no problem snacking on insects, I believed that Spanish, nor Pakistani, customs regarded the ant as a tasty meal. The son-of-a-bitch refused to refund my sandwich, so I threw it at him. Perhaps the fatigue had led me off the path of enlightenment and reengaged the traditional role of asshole vs. asshole. During the solemn ride home it became apparent that indeed the dream would have slipped through my fingers by the time my eyes opened to meet the following day.

            I decided to sleep past the check out time once again and decipher where to go next. Lucas and I tossed our bags into the hostel’s locker room and looked at some Low Definition photos of the weekend. A borrowed computer allowed me to book a flight to Liverpool for the following day. My friend Emiliano got a hold of me. He had been entertaining his visiting parents the entire weekend and now had some extra space for me. I could come over later that day and crash. Lucas and I planned to see the closing show at 22:00 that night located in an entirely foreign part of town, that happened to find itself near Emiliano’s. We set forth on a mission to find breakfast, which led us to the reliable café down the block. The sun took us further through the streets and down to las Ramblas. Colours of the city drifted past us as performers groped at young women, flower stands hung their Mediterranean aromas in the air, and peddlers shot their products into the air shouting prices.

            We stopped for all-you-can-eat falafel then carried on through the pixels and sprites of Barcelona. A solar soaked harbor greeted us with pleasure, and anti-whaling craft. Bars opened their doors with alembic stills inside. Beautiful girls in hot pants mingled below mosaic towers, curved glass and tubular steel. The boardwalk invited us to the beach where we found a patch of grass to laze on. We sat around like cattle until we eventually rose, though groggy, and took the road back to the hostel.

Lucas returned to bed and I snuck out onto the rooftop to read up on motorcycles and Zen. A stranger sat in the opposite corner of the cramped terrace. Murmurs rose from beyond the balcony. The stranger took no attention as I peeked over the edge.
“There’s a riot goin’ on!” I exclaimed. People swarmed over the street below and stalled the colourful tour buses cruising the avenue. Still, the stranger failed to take notice. The event provided interest for a good half hour as they chanted and yelled for justice. “Does this happen often, all the time even?” I thought to myself, as the traveler remained inert to the commotion. “I’ll let it be for now.” I assured myself before finishing my chapter. As abruptly as it had begun, it finished. The crowd disappeared.

            Leaving the catatonic patio populace behind, I went downstairs and found Lucas, who felt like a walk. I reciprocated, and we went hunting for demonstrators. We found them a little over a block away in Plaza Cataluña. Many were camped out on a semi-permanent basis, while most others mingled there before carrying the march forward. Banners blew in the gentle breeze which lofted hefty ideals for the few seconds long enough to inspire hope before deflating, then begging for a combined will to lift them up again. Though we couldn’t comprehend most of the rhetoric and slogans shouted to the rooftops above, we understood their meaning as well as any Spanish citizen. The crowd stopped at random integers to shout a song or perform a new march under the red and black flags. The future looked meager at best, even grim, for the youth of Europe, but for those 2km or more those people looked like they owned every square inch of the city they walked on and shouted to. They saturated the sidewalk with their futures; Barcelona had them written in its will. These descendants of the civil war wouldn’t take the crumbling of the society they built while laying down. The country may sink into economic despair, but Barcelona will take care of these people as they take care of her. Upon losing that electric populace: the city would lose its glow, go by another name, or cease to exist.

            The herd exited Via Laietana into the police brigade Plaza d'Antonio López, dispersing like foam from a shaken bottle of cava, cool and sweet. It felt as if 5000+ people had just given us a personal tour of a gorgeous Barcelona day. Lucas and I once again found ourselves at the harbour. We decided to traverse up the Ramblas, but this time to the metro station. Neither one of us could believe we had the energy to walk all the way down to the harbour, twice. I guess that’s the power of revolution. Martin Messier even made an appearance, just as stone-faced on the train as behind a sewing machine. The excitement drained as we pushed closer to the hostel. I collapsed on the roof and Lucas hit the hay below.

            We woke up a few hours later and meandered to Sónar’s last performance. When we arrived at the scene, we were surprised to learn that our tickets wouldn’t cover the show. Feeling considerably less rich, with a bag in tow, I declined to wade through the line. Lucas and I parted ways—he to Malaga, and I to Emiliano’s—our memories of the weekend more or less intact. I watched him jump off in his own direction like a rabbit with an onboard fission reactor, too unique and impractical for mass production, considered more valuable as a collector’s item.

            Emiliano greeted me late in the night, with gusto. He, and his 3 female roommates proved excellent hosts. Everyone put up with the smelly guy on the couch and treated him amiably. 2 members of the household came from Italy, 1 from the U.S.A, and the other a native Catalonian. The ethnic makeup of Barcelona reflects this multicultural representation. People from all over the world come to Barcelona to enjoy its spoils, beauty, and plenty. Toronto, New York, London, Cape Town, and Vancouver—to name a few—share these spots where beautiful girls come to flock in the sun’s bounty. Perhaps not every weekend instigates good vibrations out of nearly every soul in these cities, but for those 3 days, every face, colour, and creed met us with the universal understanding that we all just wanted a reason to smile.