Hong Kong ready to sample Sónar electronic music festival’s unrivalled range of styles and genres
Europe’s premiere experimental electronic music festival, started by three audiophiles, adds Hong Kong to its ever-growing list of global venues
There are electronic music festivals, and then there’s Sónar.
The Glastonbury Festival of the electronic-music world, Sónar has been held since 1994 in its native Barcelona, where it draws a crowd of roughly 120,000 festivalgoers over three days every June. It has spread to more than 50 cities around the world – including, finally, Hong Kong, which is set to host its inaugural Sónar at the somewhat exotic Hong Kong Science Park on April 1.
Organised in partnership with Magnetic Asia, the people behind Clockenflap, the Hong Kong event will feature a suitably eclectic line-up of musicians, including instrumental hip-hop pioneer DJ Shadow, techno legend Dave Clarke, veteran tastemaker Gilles Peterson, grime MC Lady Leshurr, experimental electronic producer Ellen Allien and creative renaissance man Daito Manabe, plus the extensive Sónar+D creative technology expo.
Sónar was born in Spain when music journalist Ricard Robles and musicians and artists Enric Palau and Sergio Caballero met by chance.
“We found we had very similar tastes in music, and we had the idea of an event that would put together the new ideas around technology and creativity, especially music,” Palau says. “We’d been artists, so we had experience being on stage, and also being behind the scenes, working on the production. We knew what needed to be done in order to put on the event properly, and of course we had the enthusiasm that comes from being fans. Probably because we’d been artists, we were very much perfectionists about how things needed to be developed.”