- It is not often you can arrive late to a club at 10:30 PM after having taken the wrong path through a forest, but such was the occasion of The Monkey Bar's second birthday. The venue is easy enough to find if you have a map or start in the right place, but thankfully on the night it was well lit and, more importantly, sending out sonic pulses into Montjuïc like a homing beacon. Indeed, once there it was hard not to feel like being inside some weird control tower or cockpit as various DJs lurked over the banks of decks, laptops and controls with the panorama of Barcelona spread out behind them like a city to conquer.
The venue itself was the Esferic, a structure originally built in 1929, but having gone through many lives since, ranging from science pavilion to beer factory to wedding reception and the occasional party. As the name suggests, the building is spherical, spread over two floors and with a convenient smoking garden. With one stair up and another down, passing from room to room began to feel like whirling around a vortex or time tunnel, a sense compounded by the shifting crowds and the often radical difference in sounds between DJs.
Running late meant no time to hear enough of either Baldo, playing live in the lower Earth room, or Patrick Specke in the upper Space Room where all the early action seemed to be. Despite the thinner crowd, it was downstairs with Tama Sumo that the night truly began. Still catching my breath, I don't know if I had needed or just expected a long, planned introduction. But, from the onset, Sumo was pleasantly disorientating, threading one style with another with no discernible pattern, like being lost again in the woods with just the constant of the beat to home in on. In less adept hands, such a risky set design could have been madness for a small crowd, but with such skill at identifying and stitching together the key elements, whether it be timbre or mood, and a penchant for unexpected turns, the music was infectious and the crowd responded with equal measures of eccentricity.
Photo credit: Luca Sgamellotti & Tato Richieri
The middle hour of Fred P's set upstairs couldn't have been more different: long, stark runs of just drums and hi-hats, almost like an extended jazz solo, but cut to oblique mathematical angles. Fred's face told a similar austere story, anchored in a motionless mask while the generous crowd moved measuredly as if entranced. It was then a chain of surprises to first find downstairs full and completely mad for the final stretch of Sumo's set which remained as eccentric as the beginning, and then on returning upstairs, to find a more animated and shamanistic Fred P meting out a swathe of lusty techno funk.
For Jeff Mills the lights went off, sending a buzz around the rammed room. Mills' intro was classical and coherent as he patiently withheld the beat and toyed with expectation as the music rose to a climax. However, the full effect of the bass drop was dampened by the sudden inadequacy of the sound system. As the crowd had expanded, so too had its capacity to absorb the sound, and the difference between the volume of Fred P and the start of Jeff Mills was noticeable, except down the front where space was at a premium. At first the kick drum lacked power and Mills clearly sensed this and began to work the mixer constantly shaping the volume by sacrificing mid range for bass and vice versa when the need was right and even intentionally looking for more distortion once he'd got his ear in.
Downstairs also suffered a little of the same problem with the inner circle of columns breaking up the sound even while creating an attractive dance space. But instead of sound problems, Santiago Salazar, Mills ex-companion from Underground Resistance, had only to contend with a thinner, albeit reverential crowd, Tama Sumo amongst them. Salazar's early face was scowling a bit as he moved slowly from more angry sounds of classic Detroit techno and UR through some heavy dub techno and finally to an exceptional close riddled with more funk-influenced sounds much like Fred P. By then Salazar was smiling and loving the intimate attention.
In the second hour of Mills' set, there was time for plenty of Axis and Purpose Maker hits, new tracks, a big trance-like drum crescendo that all seemed impressively homogenous and almost hyper-electronic compared to the more variable sets of his colleagues. The only shame was not being able to stay, but the final choice of where to end the night was with Salazar. His determination and varied selection, coupled with the better sound and space to dance downstairs, were, in the end, the winning ingredients. Two key moments were the elegant mixes of Jark Prongo's heady classic "M-Tech," and later on Âme's "Rej" which came from nowhere and brought a collective gasp and cheer from the crowd who thanked him with equal enthusiasm when all was done.