Friday turns out to be even hotter than Thursday and even the locals are suffering. I get to the festival site and manage to hook up with the Shifters. I inform Michiko that her name means “my boyfriend” in Spanish but she’d already been told. I’m amazed to find out that today’s tickets are sold out, and tonight’s sold out yesterday because everyone wants to see Bjork, so I hurry up and get my girlfriend one for tomorrow during the day before it’s too late. I heard people who’d come from Britain looking for tickets so I’d advise anyone who’s thinking about going next year to sort their tickets out in advance.

Sodaplay © Advanced Music

Sonar’s not just about music and one of my favourite parts is the Multimedia art exhibition known as SonarMatica. The ten year retrospective brings us all sort of things from an early Gasbooks 5, to Jeff Mills’ Metropolis revisited and even a Tomato project made especially for Sonar ’97.

Beyond Pages © Masaki Fujihata

Sodaplay are back with the excellent Sodaconstructor and so is Masaki Fujihata with his ’97 project Beyond Pages which really hasn’t aged a bit. But perhaps the most interesting installation has got to be Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming which goes as far back as ’96 and has everyone mesmerised. A double bed invites us to lie down with the video projected girl and play with her. Far from the coldness that ISDN and video conference technology might otherwise inspire, tickles, caresses and a little tenderness seem a natural reaction to this installation which overflows with humanity and has one user naively offering her his phone number in an attempt to overcome the interface. But she’s not having any of that, it hardly seems appropriate. But you can’t blame him for trying can you?

Sonar’s own corporate image over the years is worth an exhibition of its own for being one of the most original and innovative I’ve ever seen. The psychic twins theme for the 2000 edition was incredible; they shot pictures of two twins with a distinctive Carrie edge to them involved in all sorts of bizarre paranormal activities. The retrospective is completed with computers, CD players and video stations where we can enjoy a la carte the vast array of interactive art, videos and music that has come and gone over these past ten years. But there’s no way of overcoming the anxiety that there’s stuff going on out there that I really don’t want to miss; I’ll be damned if I spend ant more time in front of a screen so I head out because Miss Kittin set is on in a minute.

Miss Kittin © Advanced Music

As I expected: it’s packed and boiling hot. But we’re not here for the cool breeze are we? If dance music’s meant to do one thing it’s make you dance and mademoiselle K’s finally got us moving. But that’s just warm up, the best is still to come and Fabio takes over the decks with ominous shades and and massive gold chains.

Fabio © Advanced Music

And it’s a round of fine drum and bass for this BBC radio 1 session, of the kind I haven’t heard in quite some time. No warm up here, no intro, just fine breakbeats to get us twitching and hopping through the afternoon. The crowd loves it but perhaps the one detail that escapes our man is just the time of day, because within half an hour he’s journeyed far into the depths of the most nocturnal drum and bass and I’ve just got to go for a breather.

Soundcluster

Sonarama, the space dedicated to sound installations, turns out to be a little bit disappointing. The Sonusphere designed to pick up normally unheard movements of the ground is just too subtle for the general chaos and bustle going on; Roland Olbeter’s Soundclusters robots, originally created for the renowned Catalan dance company La Fura dels Baus’ Faust 3.0, somehow only dehumanise the music they perform; and MIT PhD candidates James Patten and Ben Rect’s AudioPad is probably best visited online because the queue to play with it’s just too long. Francisco Lopez’ Two Blank Spirits requires either a lot of time or a lot of patience but it’s not a bad place to chill with its large latex beds, white screen and inaudible soundtrack. Very blank indeed.