Review: MIRA Digital Arts Festival 2019

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Look: when inaudible sound becomes audible; when green lasers penetrate weird hanging globules; and when you can lie down in a cold, dark dome to watch strange, eyeless women morph into crustaceans, you know you’re operating in a pretty esoteric artistic realm. MIRA Digital Arts Festival—which combines immersive installations, avant-garde audio-visuals and some of the world’s leading electronic musicians—may well be niche, enigmatic and at times a tad pretentious, but taken as a whole, it’s a festival that shows just how interesting art can be when it embraces the digital realm and explores the seemingly infinite possibilities that this new formal frontier offers.

On a freezing, blustery weekend in mid November, Fabra i Coats—undoubtedly Barcelona’s finest space for underground music and art—shook off its preoccupations with its own history (being, as it is, an old historic textile factory) and looked to an electronic, mechanized, cyborg future. MIRA is, bar maybe Sonar and Sonar+D, Barcelona’s digital arts festival par excellence. Over three nights in those vast, urban warehouse spaces in Sant Andreu (and various other events beforehand in spaces around the city), it showcased fascinating exhibits and some of the most exciting, established electronic music artists working today. Here are our four favorites from this year’s event.

Mary Lattimore at SIMON 100

The harp is having something of a renaissance in popular music at the moment. Artists like Brandee Younger and Laura Perrudin are bringing the instrument out of cloistered conservatoires and staid folk traditions and into more mainstream styles and venues. It’s fantastic news for music: the harp is a wonderful instrument which, like the piano, can be chordal, melodic, lyrical, abrupt, an accompaniment and a soloist all in the same piece, if it so chooses. Mary Lattimore, whose music combines delightfully pretty melodies and languorous runs with some really interesting electronics, is also leading this new wave.

Her performance at the SIMON 100 space in Poblenou (a precursor to the main MIRA events at Fabra i Coats,) came after a mildly interesting walk-through, interactive light show and a rather labored conversation between artists on how light has affected their work. Lattimore, however, brought the place to life. 

It was a little surprising to see her play at MIRA fest, as although electronics are a part of her live performances, you would hardly call the harp a key part of the digital arts, so ancient and viscerally antiquated is it as an instrument. At first, it even seemed absurd—where was the electronic element?—but as her playing went through the long arpeggiated melodic tunes that the harp is so adept at, she began to incorporate that digital element. On one hand, Lattimore created dancing loops on the harp, before instantaneously altering them through an effects boxes she manipulated with the other. It was soft and dynamic, sticking with tradition while nodding to the possibilities of the digital in art, and so clearly fit MIRA’s bill. Her playing was emotive and melodic in a way that solo looping shows allow for so well. It’s also something which clearly has so many places to explore—there are not many artists utilizing the harp and electronics together at once, especially not in a live situation. It was a pleasure to see an artist taking such a wonderfully underrated instrument into paths unknown.

AUDINT Presents: OBSIDISORIUM

There’s an old, hackneyed adage which goes, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, the less popular version of that saying too (unpopular in that I have just made it up): “If a note emanates from a speaker which is too low for the human ear to recognize, does it make a sound?” The answer to both is yes, but while with the former the argument stems from the impossibility of providing proof—annoying Schrodinger's tree of a saying that it is—with the latter, it turns out proof can be found.

The OBSIDISORIUM room at MIRA festival was this saying in reality: a massive empty room where enormous speakers blasted out frequencies that on their own would be too low for the human ear to appreciate, a kind of reverse dog whistle. However, given the cavernous nature of the Fabra i Coats’ warehouse spaces, the sound waves emanating were allowed to fire out, bounce around, and grow into strange choruses of warping noise as the vibrations of the room raised the level of these frequencies, making them audible. It’s a fascinating idea: to directly use a space to create music, allowing the room to become the conductor of a strange dystopian orchestra.

For me, this in itself should be enough to constitute an interesting art exhibit, the dichotomies and impossibilities inherent to it were enough to make you stop and appreciate the unknowable magic of physics in real time. However, the creators of OBSIDISORIUM thought it also required a couple of gimmicks to keep people occupied. One was to do with collecting QR codes through an app to receive a book about the show (this didn’t work for many and was therefore completely uninteresting), while the other was a little more conceptually profound. 

On entering this dark room, punters were given a fake 20€ note and told to find someone who would give us “something to enhance the experience.” If you think this sounds like some shady person was about to give us a bag of drugs, you’re not far off. Once in the room—frequencies growing with the contours of the space—a hooded man approached and poured a mysterious “experience enhancing” powder into our hands, instructing us to gobble it up. For full disclosure (and to save them from legal action!) I should make it clear at this point that MIRA festival were not dolling out cocaine or some other naughty substance to its punters. However, in suggesting that this powder (some sugar substitute, presumably) was illegal, they introduced an interesting sort of jeopardy to the experience; an acknowledgement of illegality, or at least the pretense of it, that you would never normally expect to get from an institution. 

While even the greenest people knew they weren’t imbibing drugs, by telling them that it would do something, this mysterious white powder suddenly became something that might have the ability to enhance your experience. It could make the vibrations sound better, and do psychologically what the aforementioned drugs do chemically. It’s an interesting concept, to create the placebo effect outside of a sterile lab environment, and one that could only be done at a festival as cool, urban and forward thinking as MIRA.

DJ Haram

MIRA is the type of festival that sees DJs operate in the more arty end of the club spectrum: a little too overzealous on the gain, pumping out as much white noise as possible to create nightmare soundscapes instead of euphoric tunes. That being said, there was a lot of really great music at this year’s MIRA—Floating Points, Skee Mask, DJ Marcelle and Biosphere were all outstanding—but for a versatile set which focused on floor fillers, DJ Haram was probably my favorite. 

The New Jersey-born, Philly-based producer’s credentials are stellar: she’s a Discwoman staple who is making waves in Europe’s finest dance music destination for a while now. Her debut EP from this year, Grace, was a response to a family tragedy, something you can hear in the mournful whistles and glitchy percussion, which comes together with Arabian harmonies to create something unsettling and profound.

At MIRA, As on her EP, Haram’s musical invention came rhythmically. Middle Eastern darbuka drum patterns were probably the most defining, recognizable feature; there’s something in the bass of those drums that she managed to tease out so well, a low grumble that compliments the trappy clicks of the rest of her sound.

Western tuned ears always become unsettled when introduced to foreign harmonies, particularly the micro tonalities of the Middle East, so Haram’s meanderings in that region added a sense of the unknown, a ripple of exotic intrigue to the night as a whole, while the MC who got on stage with her ensured that it was fist pumping rather than chin striking affair.  If much avant-garde electronic music can be locked into Euro-centric eccentricity, the realm preferred by most artists playing, DJ Haram was something different, something to be celebrated, and something you could really dance to.

Sandrine Deumier and Myriam Bleau Present Realness

360 audiovisual domes are all the rage in 2019. If you read my review of the shows at the MEDIAPRO dome at Sonar+D this year (and if not, why not?) you’ll remember I wrote at length about the fascinating shows they had on—“an hour long assault on the senses” where immersion and absorption were its most defining features.

The same things can certainly be said for the MIRA Dome by Adidas Originals: immersive and absorbing it most certainly was, and it too provided a really nice respite from the thumping techno abounding elsewhere. 

My favorite of the shows was probably Sandrine Deumier and Myriam Bleau’s Realness, a piece which won MIRA’s open call for video content to be shown at the festival. Realness is something of a misnomer, as reality was not something either artists wanted to concern themselves with. They explored the polar opposite, as sinister, eyeless sirens morphed into strange crustaceans to make up most of the piece.

Deumier’s visuals felt like a strange sci-fi-Greek-myth-mash-up, enticing and unsettling in equal measure, while Bleau’s looping, loping soundscape bubbled with the disorientating depth of the sea and space. Atavism was a key motif: a call for the return to simple life forms, and a reminder of the intricacy that constitutes both ancient fossil-like creatures and ourselves. Realness as a whole felt like a call for a return to a primordial state, for us to be at one with non-humans and the earth. As a counterpoint to the digital future explored in the festival, it was truly compelling.

Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.