Plenty of clubbers will be familiar with his complaint. Although Barcelona has an impressive and ever-expanding selection of festivals focusing on everything from Brazilian music to Catalan jazz, a trip to any of the city’s big clubs at the weekend invariably means listening to the sparse, thudding sounds of minimal house and techno.
These two niches of dance music overlap at many points and, to all but devoted fans, are more or less indistinguishable. Both based on a heavy, 4/4 rhythm at a medium tempo, they’re as unadorned as the name suggests: variation is added through looped chord sequences, glitchy sound effects, or through the DJ adding sounds or taking them away. It’s not the sort of music you can hum in the shower.
Thousands enjoy Barcelona’s minimal boom every weekend, but plenty of others—especially foreign residents, who are often used to a little more variety—find the dominance of this music alienating. Christian Vogel, another British producer and DJ, moved to Barcelona six years ago, and no longer performs here. “When I first came here things were a bit more varied and interesting, but now I DJ mostly in Germany, because that’s where they’re interested in the vanguard, in new sounds, rather than in straightforward, drinking-cubata music. I mean, there’s a time and a place for that, and luckily we get to choose. But is there much choice here? No. If you want to check out music and bands here you go to the festivals. I haven’t performed regularly as a DJ here for the past two years.”
Even industry bosses are starting to feel that things in Barcelona have grown a little monotonous. “We’re hoping that we can get past this minimal house and minimal techno boom that, although it’s been fun for the past few years, is starting to get a little bit boring,” said Iñaky Bau, head of dance music importers and distributors Decoder Muzique. “Perhaps we’d like something a bit less electronic, a bit more melodic. Something that’s not so hard, so minimalist, something a little more friendly.”
But how has the clubbing scene become so musically homogenous? Bau thinks that Spain’s comparatively late arrival onto the dance music scene could help explain this single-mindedness. “It was only a few years ago that we entered into this new electronic music scene.”
Latest Comments