Sónar 2011: Day 2

The SonarDome stage throughout the weekend has entirely featured alumni from the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the yearly Academy has built a reputation for nurturing sophisticated and intricate electronica, it quickly became clear that straight-up dance music is part of their ethos too. Any remaining hangovers were blasted away by New York DJ and producer Star Eyes (pictured below), one of the few American artists to have supported British grime and dubstep music since those genres first emerged from the UK garage scene around the turn of the millennium.

This rooting in British rave history showed, as she collapsed together scenes, sounds and eras. Hearing the euphoria of early-Nineties rave mixed with newer sounds, not for nostalgia value but with a real sense of how they related to one another and worked together musically, was extremely refreshing. Likewise, DJ Zinc – a Londoner deeply rooted in drum'n'bass and the sounds that followed it, but now playing his own aggressive brand of house music – showed a real sense of how the past is a part of the sound of now.

But it was Katy B, the young singer whose album Zinc (pictured below) co-produced, who dominated the SonarDome stage. Only 21, Katy is the figurehead for a generation schooled in both music and the workings of the industry, and has honed a kind of pop performance that carries real weight thanks to its immersion in club culture. With a full band behind her, her songs connected to their rhythmic backing as only someone who has spent many hours dancing to house and disco music can manage – and the reaction of everyone in the packed-to-the-rafters arena showed that this relationship to the dancefloor was mutual.

But Sónar crowds will rave to much stranger music. In the darkened SonarComplex hall, Canadian Martin Messier's Sewing Machine Orquestra did what the name suggested. An array of old Singer sewing machines wired up to a computer chattered, hummed and whirred with a surprising amount of melody, drawing a crowd that was at first curious, then simply delighted. Also in the SonarComplex, a showcase of artists on the Tri Angle label threw us into a dark and very beautiful sonic world.

The Tri Angle artists oOoOO, How to Dress Well and Holy Other are united by a churchy sense of drama: their electronic drones and chords full of yearning for the sublime. Holy Other in particular created some of the most otherworldly atmospheres I've heard in a long time. Performing in a black T-shirt and what appeared to be a hangman's hood, with strobe-lit projections of fluttering cloth on the screens behind him, he created a very new kind of drawn-out, floating techno sound that was both rarefied and very direct.

There were no such spaced-out sounds at Sónar by Night, though. In a vast exhibition centre on the outskirts of Barcelona, this was right back to rave music: in contrast to previous years at Sónar, electronic beats dominated. Dizzee Rascal and M.I.A. provided a huge injection of personality, both filling arenas with unsubtle but well-directed shouting and clattering beats. The legendary Aphex Twin didn't go as far out on a limb as in some of his artier projects, but provided a set of techno that drew the ravers in then twisted the beats out from under them, puzzling and delighting in equal measure with the gurgles and growls that seeped around the more straightforward sounds.

But it was Radio 1's stage where the action really was. The station's star dance-music DJ Annie Mac showed how varied current populist club sounds really are. Katy B delivered another, more expansive set for the night-time crowd. And Bristolian producer Redlight gave the biggest demonstration so far in the weekend of the vitality of modern British sounds. Hefty house music, Jamaican dancehall, the bass weight of dubstep and drum'n'bass, and the zingy hooks of more commercial dance music all blended, while MCs and singers including Ms Dynamite whipped the crowd into dancing with far more vigour than is entirely decent at 4.30am.