BarcelonaCountry: SpainArea: 506,030 km²Time zone: GMT +1

Barcelona and the autonomous community of Catalonia has a proud musical heritage. Paintings in the nearby Roca dels Moros cave dating back to the Stone Age depicting figures dancing are some of the earliest artistic depictions of music.

Earlier this year at Sonar festival in Barcelona, I watched an extremely tall, milky-skinned bald man called Blackhaine struggle to contain himself. A Lancastrian musician and contemporary dancer recently hired to choreograph Kanye West’s Donda listening parties, Blackhaine was alone on stage, wearing a nondescript black hoodie and combat boots, illuminated only by stroboscopic lights. Against a punishingly loud soundscape, he was bent double and screaming into his microphone. As waves of bass shook the walls and fog enveloped the audience, he began contorting himself into a series of agonising-looking poses: ceiling punches, demi-pointes, convulsions that resembled those of a just-killed fish. Blackhaine has credited watching the “spice heads” of his adopted home of Manchester as inspiration for his idiosyncratic physical movements.

Disappearing to the side of the stage to smoke a cigarette, he was replaced by another bald, identically dressed man, and then another. New Blackhaine doppelgangers began spawning on stage and soon it became impossible to tell who the “real” performer was. It was as if Blackhaine was puppeteering some nightmarish exorcism, summoning the demons of white male rage like grunted worms and leaving them to battle about on stage. With a final pained scream, the stage went black as the performers exited the stage. House lights on and applause over, “Never Too Much” by Luther Vandross played.

An often-pugilistic audiovisual spectacle would come to define my time at Sonar, a three-day music and technology festival in Barcelona. If all festivals are defined by the relationship between the programming, the audience, and the architecture of the site – Glastonbury’s muddy fields and West Country mysticism, or Burning Man’s desert-scorched survivalist cosplay – then Sonar is a more slippery prospect. Unfolding in the stark concrete hallways of two conference centres on the outskirts of Barcelona, Sonar is an urban festival with a distinctly institutional flavour. It began life in 1994 as the “Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art”, as much a networking event for the music technology industry as it was an excuse to let loose. In the ensuing three decades, Sonar has ballooned into an enormous endeavour, with 120,000 attendees from across the world. Locals may complain about the “Sonar circus” that makes getting a taxi nearly impossible, but the festival boosts the Barcelona economy by 0.6% every year. The Barcelona event is only the largest of the hundreds of satellite events that have occurred under the Sonar banner in cities around the world. Several months before my trip, the Lisbon edition entertained just under 20,000 attendees from 50 countries.

The notion that there is space in a festival for intellectual as well as bodily pleasures is trumpeted by rave historians, advertising agencies, and festival sponsors alike, but few festivals emphasise this dynamic more than Sonar. The festival prides itself on the relationships it has developed with key multidisciplinary artists – Richie Hawtin, Arca, Matthew Herbert – to use the festival as a space for activations not possible in a gig or a club setting. In a conversation around the festival’s 25th anniversary, Sonar cofounder Enric Palau claimed that what made Sonar’s curation unique was “to treat music as an important cultural asset – programming artists in the context of a museum as opposed to in a nightclub or a rave.”

You can see Sonar’s fingerprints in the new media festivals – Unsound, Draaimolen, Supersonic, ROBOT – that emerge across Europe with Whack-A-Mole reliability, all of which maintain some form of conference element alongside music programming. Discussing the tendency of electronic musicians to layer their performances with frameworks indebted to the gallery and the academy, critic Simon Reynolds suggests that concept-driven projects “offer a way for artists to compete in an attention economy that is over-supplied while reflecting their enthusiasm for a vast array of ideas.” Neither part of mass culture nor “underground” but a “subsidised vanguard”, Reynolds identifies festivals such as Sonar as an offshoot of the experience economy, a middle way between illicit thrills and intellectual nourishment. Part of me questioned this tentative positioning, the presumption that the pleasures of music must be mediated with a conceptual framing. Does music need to be taken out of the rave and supplemented with an eat-your-greens self-seriousness to be taken seriously, or to justify its necessity?

Still, I couldn’t fault the boldness of Sonar’s programming, and the openness it instigated in the remarkably well-behaved and respectful audience. Later into the day, we chanced upon the Japanese screamo-gabber band Violent Magic Orchestra performing their album DEATH RAVE. Against a grisly screen backdrop of mutating flesh, the group stood aloft holding floodlight torches into the crowd, occasionally illuminating their corpse-painted faces and screeching into their microphones. It was so loud I had to walk to the back of the stage, where I watched a very recently born baby being gently rocked to sleep. What might have been relegated to the graveyard slot at any number of festivals was given headliner billing, received with the same level of engagement as Kaytranada’s crowd-pleasing set later in the evening.

We found our way to “Second Self”, a performance work by Myriam Bleau and Nien Tzu Weng. Both digital artists working with choreography, their performance saw the duo wearing digital screens that suggested Greek theatre masks, or an emoji cut down the middle, tentatively circling each other. Against projected backgrounds of melting and deconstructing VR faces, outrageous pulses of noise sounded whenever one body breached the other, a perpetual cold war of proximity never to be resolved. How might it feel, the performance suggested, to become sublimated into the digital? What might it do to our interpersonal relationships? Are we destined to be a fungible token in a system out of one’s control? More provocatively, it asked, would it feel good?

“Does it feel good?” became a question I asked myself with increasing regularity over the two days and three nights of the festival, powered by inadvisable amounts of complimentary Red Bull and drink tokens kindly supplied by ME Barcelona. The answer, as it turned out, was almost always “yes”, especially in the case of disco diva Jessie Ware. Performing her aptly titled new album That! Feels Good! in a makeshift burlesque house called The Pearl, she vamped her way through her back catalogue flanked by two limber male dancers. At one point, she branded a whip and hit it against the stage, before donning a fluffy pink gown and singing a cover of “Believe” by Cher. It was pure camp, delivered with textbook professionalism; it was also about as far from Sonar’s original philosophy as it is possible to get.

A man giving an improvised modular synthesiser performance in Sonar D+. Inspired by telephone switchboards, the instrument allows the player to create novel sounds by connecting different modules with patch cables