In this year’s Sónar+D programme there’s an artist who connects with several of our themes. The connection is less explicit, and more to do with the person himself. For Shoeg, who hails from Tortosa, South down the coast from Barcelona, is a singular artist and a reference point for digital culture and music in Catalonia and beyond.

Before the words Dark Forest Theory of the Internet gained widespread traction, he was already off social media and most digital networks - he’s almost impossible to find. That’s in stark contrast to his approach to performance, which merges body and code: instead of hiding behind a laptop screen on stage, he uses sensors taken from video game technology to control his array of instruments and gadgets. True fact: his own stage presence is so powerful that many of the dance companies who have commissioned music for him have ended up putting him on stage.

At Sónar+D he’s performing VANDALIZE - his 2025 album released on his own imprint Corda - for the first time. It follows a thread already established on previous performance Phantom Touch and his 2024 record Cross Section. The live show translates the ideas of the eponymous album into performance, faithful to the project’s collage logic, but integrating elements of metamorphic percussion associated with the American school of minimalism (especially Philip Glass). The piece documents four years of unexpected findings and unplanned connections around ideas of agency, complexity, and sustainability.

His intuitive approach challenges ideas of instant assimilation in a world obsessed with pattern-recognition, where simplification of systems is also what makes them fragile. In his performance this is materialised as an interface where bodies, motion sensors, voices, sounds and images come together in real time, without ever quite understanding each other, retaining the tension that helps new relations emerge. What emerges from a system, before we can recognise the system itself?