- Barcelona's annual Störung festival has always been good, but perhaps never as satisfying as this year. The 2013 edition saw a number of new elements come together to reinforce the sense of community at the festival's heart, while also pushing it into new territory. Firstly, there was another robust jump in crowd numbers. Then there was Sonuos label boss Finn Of Tomland DJing a compelling selection of low BPM electronica, ambient and dub for several days in a row in the venue bar, offering a nice contrast to the performances and creating a social center for each night's activities.
There was also a lot of humour in the music this year, from Finn Of Tomland's antics behind the decks, to Das Synthetische Mischgewebe's performance with modified household items and motorised toys. But it was Czech artist Artificial Memory Trace that had the biggest laugh, playing underwater and with blinding strobes.
These kinds of experiences are central to Störung, and there were plenty of them on offer. Francisco López worked the auditorium space beautifully with another quadrophonic performance, the audience facing outwards with him in the center. Jacob Kierkegaard delivered an intense drone set, manipulating different frequencies into incredibly sharp focus and moving them about the room. Mika Vaino's patchy performance was all about the physicality of the sound, with waves of bass smashing through the room hard enough to compress the air. Some of his changes were clumsy, perhaps intentionally so, as if to make a point that his laptop-free music is not machine perfect. The ambitious and down-to-earth Japanese artist Yui Onodera was another standout. Frenchman Mathias Deplanque impressed with his brooding drones, sheets of noise and quiet abstractions.
Norwegian duo Pjusk were among the few to feature beats in their glacial music, the other being Moritz von Oswald, who closed the festival with a career-spanning DJ set. Over the course of an hour he managed to work material from Maurizio, Rhythm and Sound, Basic Channel and his recent projects into a happily uneven tapestry. It might not have been perfect for the club, but hearing him change from slow reggae beats to 4/4 and back again felt like a great privilege.