Sónar Hong Kong manages, unlike some other brand-name electronic music festivals that have gone international, to recreate the vibe of the original – which, in Sónar’s case, is a monumental celebration of electronic music and its culture that takes place in Barcelona every July.

Founded in 1994 by journalist Ricard Robles and musicians and artists Enric Palau and Sergio Caballero, it started as a modest affair, attracting about 6,000 people, but now attracts more than 120,000 through the gates, and it has satellite events in more than 50 other cities.

The Hong Kong iteration began in 2017, headlined by Dave Clarke, DJ Shadow and Gilles Peterson, while last year’s event featured Squarepusher, Laurent Garnier and The Black Madonna.

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“[At] Sónar, we want to be pushing the envelope and introducing cutting-edge acts you wouldn’t otherwise see in Hong Kong, but also names that people are familiar with and that draw people in,” says Justin Sweeting, music director of festival organiser Magnetic Asia, which is also behind Clockenflap.

“It’s a place where the accessible and the avant garde can meet. We spend a lot of time thinking about what that balance means in practice,” he adds. “Sónar attracts people … who are into discovery. It helps people appreciate how much great music is going on out there.”

This year the closing party slot in the main indoor SónarClub venue is taken by Spanish DJ John Talabot, who plays deep house spiked with lush, tropical sounds. His music is an intriguing contribution of warm and spectral, enveloping but full of space.

“He’s been associated with Sónar for many years, and he so accurately puts across what the event is about,” says Sweeting. “He hasn’t done much in Hong Kong before, and it’s an opportunity to right that wrong.”

Taking up the niche so brilliantly filled by Floating Points last year is Bonobo (also known as Briton Simon Green), who, for two decades, has been creating eclectic downtempo soundscapes by combining electronica with jazz, classical and a global palette of influences, from African and Indian to Latin.

Expect his DJ set to be a little more propulsive and bass-driven (i.e. better to dance to) than his blissed-out recorded output.

This year’s act that truly embodies the Sónar ethos is US producer, singer and ace bass guitarist Thundercat, the final performer at the outdoor SónarVillage venue.

With an eclectic jazz-fusion-funk-soul style, he has collaborated with everyone from Flying Lotus, Erykah Badu, Childish Gambino and Red Hot Chili Peppers to Ty Dolla Sign, N.E.R.D and Travis Scott. He most notably played a pivotal role in the production of Kendrick Lamar’s lauded 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly”.

“He treads that really tricky line of being very technical and muso, and being hard to watch without being drawn in,” says Sweeting. “Seeing him alone is worth more than the value of the ticket.”

AlunaGeorge are probably this year’s poppiest act. The British duo of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid make lush, enveloping, futuristic pop with lightly worn influences from R&B, synth-pop dubstep and UK garage.

“They’re younger-skewing in their audience,” says Sweeting. “We want to get the younger generation in, and turn them into fans of a broader range of electronic music.”

Getting the party properly started in the evening in SónarClub are a pair of legendary underground names. First up is Anja Schneider, who is sort of the godmother of Berlin techno. She spent more than a decade as the boss of much loved label Mobilee, where she discovered the likes of Solomun and Nicole Moudaber, before stepping away from it in 2017 to focus on her own music.

Then there’s Art Department, formerly a duo but now just Jonny White, founder of label No. 19 Music, whose style is melodic but with raw, grainy, old-school production.

Other overseas artists include a collaboration between US hip-hop producer Ryan Hemsworth and Japanese rap duo Yurufuwa Gang, South Korean minimal house producer and rapper Park Hye-jin, UK techno producer Benjamin Damage, Japanese offbeat techno producer Object Blue, and hard-edged UK alt dancehall artist Gaika.

Among the local Hong Kong artists, meanwhile, are Marco Yu, JayMe and Visaal, who all operate between house and techno, and genre-benders like Youri and Miss Yellow.

This year’s Sónar+D will feature a range of dazzlingly high-concept performances and experiences. There’s the virtual reality (VR) programme, for example, which features two digital reimaginings of real environments: Taiwan as a “Ghost Island” and Hong Kong as a “Post-Industrial Landscape”.

“Both pieces of VR use 3D scanning hardware and software to build environments that are digital captures of real landscapes,” says Magnetic Asia artistic director Jay Forster. “It’s the sort of thing you can only experience in VR.”

Among the art works on display, “Narratives”, by Hong Kong-based Manolis Perrakis and Mathis Antony, is a collection of reclining chairs that visitors sit on while being played self-improvement messages gathered from the internet, which have been generated based on their age, sex and the emotions displayed on their face.

The intriguing “Sonic Garden” by UK artist Mileece is a system that creates music from bioelectrical energy, turning plants and people into music.

“All living organisms emit electricity,” says Forster. “What Mileece does is connect electrodes to plants, which are sensitive to changes in electrical output, with an interface that amplifies the signal.”

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Audiovisual performances – which this year include Hong Qile from Beijing, “Nerve & pink; money” from Hong Kong, and Clon and Nwrmntc from the UK – are an important component of the festival, he adds.

“The audiovisual experience is very much part of electronic music culture; this is rebalancing the audio with the visual, because the audio doesn’t necessarily precede the visual.”

Sónar+D will also feature a wide-ranging series of talks, the MarketLab technology expo, and the ever popular workshops, which continue to get booked out early.

Sónar Hong Kong 2019, Hong Kong Science Park, Saturday April 13 from 12pm to 10.45pm. Ticket price HK$680. Tickets from Ticketflap.