News
05/08/2026Relive some of the best performances from Sónar 2026 
15/09/2026AI & Music Podcast powered by S+T+ARTS: notes from the latent space
Did you spend all weekend at SonarClub? Were you locked in at SonarLab x Rinse, or unable to escape Speedy J’s STOOR Live at SonarCar? Or could you not stop dancing under the sun - and then the stars - at SonarVillage by Estrella Damm? However you spent Sónar 2026, now we’re giving you the option to live it all again - or catch up on what you missed - thanks to a series of recordings produced in collaboration with our partners at Sónar 2026. We’ve compiled them all in this YouTube playlist, but you can also read on for more detail. Sónar 2026 x ARTE Concert ARTE Concert returned to Sónar for the third year running, this time recording most of the live shows and DJ sets that took place at SonarVillage by Estrella Damm. You can now watch complete performances by WhoMadeWho, Modeselektor and SBTRKT, as well as DJ sets by the likes of Arthi, LOVEFOXY, Cormac, Carlita, Lady Shaka b2b Tash LC, and, of course, Gerd Janson b2b Marcel Dettmann.
ARTE Concert also ventured into SonarClub to record a pair of powerful, potent sessions by Sara Landry and DJ Gigola. You can watch all of these recordings via YouTube or the ARTE website. Sónar 2026 x Rinse SonarLab x Rinse brought a distinctly UK flavour to Sónar this year, with house and techno joined by sounds from across the bass music lineage: everything from drum’n’bass, dubstep and jungle to footwork and UK garage.
London-based radio station Rinse has now published the sets from Doc Scott ft. Medic MC, Danielle b2b Ryan Elliott, Addison Groove, ISA, Wata Igarashi live, Riria, DJ MARIA. and Olivia Babe, as well as a juicy extract of Nia Archives’ brand-new live show. Rinse also brought a portable radio studio booth to Fira Gran Via, where they hosted special sessions with local and international artists including Zuri, GOTH-TRAD, Fukcnormal b2b Lesbiannette, TAYHANA, Zora Jones, and LOVEFOXY b2b RONI.
All sets are available on YouTube, as well as the Rinse FM app and website. Sónar 2026 x betevé Barcelona local TV station betevé were recording live from SonarHall, where they caught special sets by Cabaret Voltaire, The Hacker, Scaler and YHWH Nailgun as well as emerging local artists MERCÈ, Beatrix Weapons, and Ani in the Hall.
They’ll be releasing sets throughout the summer over at their website. Sónar 2026 x STOOR Live In 2026, we turned over SonarCar to Speedy J and his audiovisual team for three days of extended collaborative live improvisations that went way beyond techno: STOOR Live. The first session took place on Thursday 18th June, with five heady hours featuring Colin Benders, Nadia Struiwigh, Reeko, .VRIL, plus Speedy J himself. The second, on Friday 19th, lasted seven hours and featured FJAAK, KiNK and Nene H alongside Speedy J. And the third, on Saturday 20th, featured Dasha Rush, Luke Slater, Mathew Jonson, Ø [Phase] and Speedy J.
Did you miss out? Or want to relive the entire experience again? Either way, you can now watch it all on the STOOR YouTube here. Plus as a special bonus, Speedy J and various other STOOR collaborators were in the live chats during the premieres, so you can also browse the conversations as the recordings play. Sónar 2026 Highlights Still haven’t had enough? We’ve also uploaded the full Insight Into Mind and Space show by 30drop, which featured visual artist Santiago to kick off SonarHall on Saturday. We also uploaded a series of short clips to our YouTube channel: you’ll find highlights of shows including The Prodigy, Skepta, Namasenda, Chris Stussy, Miss Bashful, Cabaret Voltaire, Arp Frique & The Perpetual Singers, and Boys Noize, plus many more. Watch them all here on our highlights playlist.
All sets are available on YouTube, as well as the Rinse FM app and website. Sónar 2026 x betevé Barcelona local TV station betevé were recording live from SonarHall, where they caught special sets by Cabaret Voltaire, The Hacker, Scaler and YHWH Nailgun as well as emerging local artists MERCÈ, Beatrix Weapons, and Ani in the Hall.
From the first flute carved out of bone to the modern synthesiser, technology and music have always been inseparable. Composers wrote rules to generate music centuries before the first computer did so in the 1950s. But today we’re standing at a different kind of threshold. The tools no longer simply execute the ideas we bring to them: they learn, they respond, they suggest directions we hadn’t thought to take. This series asks what that changes. Is artificial intelligence just a more sophisticated instrument, or something closer to a collaborator with its own agency? Where does the music inside these systems come from? Whose voices, whose work, whose consent? And what actually happens in the studio, beyond the press releases, when an artist sits down with these tools? Across three thematic episodes and ten full interviews, we speak with the people building this field from the inside: the creator of Wekinator, the founder of Neutone, the duo behind seven years of nonstop AI-generated death metal, and artists working with everything from Thai fiddles to quantum circuits. Some are optimistic, some are furious, and several are both. The series is hosted by Antònia Folguera, curator at Sónar+D; powered by S+T+ARTS, an initiative funded by the European Commission; and produced in Barcelona by the Sónar+D team, in collaboration with music producer and artist Phran. Episode 01 - Instrument or Co-Player?
Is AI just a more sophisticated instrument, or something closer to a collaborator with its own agency? Artists, researchers and instrument builders describe tools that suggest, resist and surprise - and search for the vocabulary to name what they're playing with.
Episode 02 - Whose Voices, Whose Data
Every neural network has a past. This chapter asks who made the music inside these systems, who gave permission, and who gets paid, while it looks at the artists building consent-based alternatives, from individual licensing deals to choir-owned data trusts.
Episode 03 - The Burnout and the Breakthrough
COMING SOON Not the myth of the studio, but the real one: the two-year project that ended in burnout, the dataset curated like a recipe, the lineage of algorithmic music that reaches back to the 17th century. What actually happens when artists sit down with these tools.
Interview 01 - Anna Xambó
COMING SOON Live coder and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London on building MIRLCa, her tool for navigating vast Creative Commons sound archives, and why the lack of control is part of what makes it interesting.
Interview 02 - yaboihanoi ญาบอยฮานอย
COMING SOON Winner of the 2022 AI Song Contest on apprenticing with Thai luthiers, circumventing MIDI to synthesise directly into Thai tuning systems, and why music is never the mp3 file.
Interview 03 - Rob Clouth
COMING SOON Electronic musician and software designer on the AI project that took two years and ended in burnout, the strange appeal of English-sounding nonsense, and how AI is changing the way he decides whether music is good.
Interview 04 - Marta Verde
COMING SOON Visual artist and Berklee Valencia educator on using Stable Diffusion as a black box, feeding its output back into itself, and why AI should lead to more happy accidents rather than more automation.
Interview 05 - Rebecca Fiebrink
COMING SOON The creator of Wekinator on releasing machine learning tools for musicians in 2008, when neural networks were deeply uncool, and why small personal datasets often beat big ones.
Interview 06 - Thor Magnusson
COMING SOON Director of the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Iceland on instruments that become co-players, algorithmic music in the 17th century, and why prompting a song is a simulation of music rather than music-making.
Interview 07 - Ben Cantil
COMING SOON Co-founder of Datamind Audio on licensing sounds directly from artists instead of labels, curating a dataset as a creative act, and why software is a form of human expression.
Interview 08 - Cris Checa
COMING SOON Technologist and Sónar+D curator on making music like she's in a lab, why she resisted AI at first, and the difference between democratizing creation and democratizing experimentation.
Interview 09 - CJ Carr (Dadabots)
COMING SOON The duo behind seven years of nonstop AI-generated death metal on open source, de-skilling, quantum synthesisers, and the question nobody at NeurIPS was asking: how do we make music harder?
Interview 10 - Nao Tokui (Neutone)
COMING SOON Founder of Neutone on training your own models instead of Silicon Valley's, AI as alien rather than artificial intelligence, and why he misses the uncanny sounds of older, worse technology.
Is AI just a more sophisticated instrument, or something closer to a collaborator with its own agency? Artists, researchers and instrument builders describe tools that suggest, resist and surprise - and search for the vocabulary to name what they're playing with.
Episode 02 - Whose Voices, Whose Data
Every neural network has a past. This chapter asks who made the music inside these systems, who gave permission, and who gets paid, while it looks at the artists building consent-based alternatives, from individual licensing deals to choir-owned data trusts.
Episode 03 - The Burnout and the Breakthrough
COMING SOON Not the myth of the studio, but the real one: the two-year project that ended in burnout, the dataset curated like a recipe, the lineage of algorithmic music that reaches back to the 17th century. What actually happens when artists sit down with these tools.
Interview 01 - Anna Xambó
COMING SOON Live coder and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London on building MIRLCa, her tool for navigating vast Creative Commons sound archives, and why the lack of control is part of what makes it interesting.
Interview 02 - yaboihanoi ญาบอยฮานอย
COMING SOON Winner of the 2022 AI Song Contest on apprenticing with Thai luthiers, circumventing MIDI to synthesise directly into Thai tuning systems, and why music is never the mp3 file.
Interview 03 - Rob Clouth
COMING SOON Electronic musician and software designer on the AI project that took two years and ended in burnout, the strange appeal of English-sounding nonsense, and how AI is changing the way he decides whether music is good.
Interview 04 - Marta Verde
COMING SOON Visual artist and Berklee Valencia educator on using Stable Diffusion as a black box, feeding its output back into itself, and why AI should lead to more happy accidents rather than more automation.
Interview 05 - Rebecca Fiebrink
COMING SOON The creator of Wekinator on releasing machine learning tools for musicians in 2008, when neural networks were deeply uncool, and why small personal datasets often beat big ones.
Interview 06 - Thor Magnusson
COMING SOON Director of the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Iceland on instruments that become co-players, algorithmic music in the 17th century, and why prompting a song is a simulation of music rather than music-making.
Interview 07 - Ben Cantil
COMING SOON Co-founder of Datamind Audio on licensing sounds directly from artists instead of labels, curating a dataset as a creative act, and why software is a form of human expression.
Interview 08 - Cris Checa
COMING SOON Technologist and Sónar+D curator on making music like she's in a lab, why she resisted AI at first, and the difference between democratizing creation and democratizing experimentation.
Interview 09 - CJ Carr (Dadabots)
COMING SOON The duo behind seven years of nonstop AI-generated death metal on open source, de-skilling, quantum synthesisers, and the question nobody at NeurIPS was asking: how do we make music harder?
Interview 10 - Nao Tokui (Neutone)
COMING SOON Founder of Neutone on training your own models instead of Silicon Valley's, AI as alien rather than artificial intelligence, and why he misses the uncanny sounds of older, worse technology.