Buenos nachos from Barcelona. This is getting exhausting. Too much music. Some further reflections from Sónar after the jump. Day 1 recap here.

At around 5pm, the crowd rushed down to the Escenario Hall, filling it to capacity well ahead of the ambient metal of Sunn O))), and since your lazy reporter did not make it in time, he was left to feel the rumblings that shook the building for about two hours. And to see the audience leaving the venue a bit more subdued than they were before.

Right after that, Clark played a decent set of angular acoustic glitch to a slightly less packed house, with jittery music-box melodies atop the kind of drum sequencing you get from spending too much time with your computer, except with a live drummer. It was nice.

Better suited to the sunshine was the Hot as HEL showcase in the SónarVillage, an afternoon curated by a collective of Finnish labels and shops (including the excellent Stupido, which you should visit next time you're in Helsinki). The best fun was to be had for Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators, whose LP "Keep Reachin' Up" is about to get its stateside release from Seattle's own Light in the Attic.

They clearly enjoyed themselves as much as the crowd did, playing a solid, energetic set of new-school funk and soul. Nicole's voice was top-notch, as was her band, and several of the crowd's transcendent "we're all in this together" moments bridged her set and the lovely mid-tempo house and disco intermissions from DJ team the Executives.

How to Rock

Do you want to rock? I mean, really fucking rock? Just do what Accu do. They're from Finland, and they rock properly. See?

Check out how they rock. They've got pink shirts and cowboy hats. They've got two key-tars. He sings in a sultry falsetto, and he points at the crowd while he does it. When he's not singing, he's swinging the mic-stand around his head and throwing stuff into the audience. At one point, he cooled off his key-tarist by theatrically dousing him with a bottle of water, even though they'd only been on stage for four minutes. For the bridge of "Night Freak," their bass player does a Thriller-style Vincent Price monologue. During the breakdowns, they put one hand aloft and assume the "feel the power of my reverberating strings" pose, even through they're playing keyboards. These guys rock, rock, rock.

See?

Hello Everybody, We Are Cornelius Group, From Tokyo City

Cornelius brought his Group and his Synchronized Show to the SónarPark on Friday night, playing a set that's about as intimate as you can get in an airplane hangar filled with 5,000 people. Despite the scale, the sound and performance were excellent, with his charming videos playing perfectly in sync with the band. Since I was out of town when this show came through Seattle a while back, I was doubly thrilled to check it out here. If you haven't picked up his latest ("Sensuous") yet, please go and do that.

There is also some more nice Cornelius video, but it's quite long and the connection here in the hotel sucks. So I'll add it later.

Update: A bit of video here:

Audible Haze

I forgot to mention that dubstep is well-represented at the festival this year, with Kode9 and Spaceape, Oris Jay, Various Productions and Radio 1 DJ/scene evangelist Mary Anne Hobbs on the bill. I caught most of this showcase, and it was pretty much all like this:

Kode9 took ten full minutes to trigger his first kick drum, relying instead on one-note filling-rattling basslines, percussive fits and wandering melodies upon which the Spaceape did his paranoid vocal surfing. The crowd response was as enthusiastic as for the Beastie Boys one room over, which is odd but cool for such an intense, suffocating form of music, and my only complaint was that Spaceape's vocals were way too low in the mix.

Now to Not Rock

I sat on my opinion of Justice's live show for a while, because I wasn't quite sure. Lots of hype around these guys. But my first impression was that there was one guy playing their records and making lots of "check out how awesome our records are!" gestures, while everyone else just held up silly props and acted quite pleased with the fact that they're getting paid to get drunk on stage at a big famous festival while the rest of us have to do accounting or whatever.

Maybe it's just about making a spectacle and doing whatever it takes to make the party happen. (And, judging from the crowd response, this was all it took.) The excess and fake-stardom of DJ culture can be over-the-top, so why not just give in, and cash in? It's just entertainment, after all, and nobody's getting hurt... OK, maybe I get it.

Maybe they're being all "ha ha, only serious," like Daft Punk. But I'm not sold -- if it's a joke, it's one that's as old as the records they're sampling. What do you think? What am I missing here? Are these guys for real?

Having slept and relaxed all day (and only slightly regretting missing the daytime programming), now it's off to the final night of the festival, with Altern8, Jeff Mills, Matthew Dear's Big Hands, Devo, Mogwai, the Innervisions showcase with Dixon, Ame and Chateau Flight and more. As I go straight from venue to hotel to airport, it may be a day or two before the recap arrives. Sorry.