Sónar 2026 - SonarMix 021: Angel Molina

10/05/2023SonarMix 021: Angel Molina - Dark, obsessive techno

Angel Molina’s appearance at Sónar 2023 won’t be like the others.

The Barcelona artist still remembers his performance at the first edition of the festival in 1994: “I was really nervous. Sónar, was without a doubt, my first milestone at that time,” he says. “I played an hour long set, both daring and breakneck, which finished with a minute of noise and then silence afterwards. The silence was only broken by applause from the audience. Impossible to put that feeling into words.”

There’s no one who’s better placed to close Sónar’s 30th anniversary celebrations. “It will be a special set, different to any of my usual techno sets,” he tells us. “I’ll probably play some classics (something I don’t usually do), but I’m not going to base the set on the past at all. It's about celebrating being here today.”

Nonetheless, SonarMix 021 shows us the Angel Molina we know and love, focused on “the sound of contemporary techno, that is the darkest, most obsessive, industrial and futuristic” side of the genre. The set, which includes tracks by Christian Wünsch, Nørbak, Ribé, and Temudo, is an extract from a recent three hour set recorded in the heat of the night in Barcelona.

It's interesting to see how the discourse darkens; despite the moments of decompression, the tension created from the beginning is maintained at all times," he stresses. Although it’s far from what he has in mind to close Sónar this year, it demonstrates "perfectly" what he’s doing right now.

An hour of relentless yet smooth techno that hovers around 140bpm, and brings us a little close to the 30th anniversary celebrations. Angel’s already planned his itinerary: from Oneohtrix Point Never, Lorenzo Senni, and Deena Abdelwahed at Sónar by Day, to Wata Igarashi, Alizzz, and of course Fever Ray and Aphex Twin at Sónar by Night. He’s also drawn to the “interesting b2b between Tiga and Cora Novoa.”

"It's a festival that I've watched grow from close up and that I'm pleased to have been part of (as an audience member and as a professional). In a way, I feel that it's mine".

Tracklist:

Kaiser - Routine

PRSPCTV aka XENTRIX - Straight To The Point (DJ Tuttle & Chich)

USAW - Edged

USAW - 5th Floor

Vibrations Of Gravity - Not A NPC

Marc Faenger - Roll Call

Christian Wünsch - Venus

Christian Wünsch - Quantized Spacetime

Skebo - The Unacknowledged

Christian Wünsch - Perpetual Vortex

Vibrations Of Gravity - Wounds All Over My Body