We were lucky enough to attend the 15th edition of the MIRA Festival in Barcelona, on the 6th and 7th of November, with performances by renowned artists such as Tortoise, Martin Rev (Suicide), Space Afrika and Grand River, among others.
There were 3 days of previous events at Sala Apolo, and the festival drew over 15,000 people that immersed themselves in electronic music and digital art. The main congregation took place at Fira Montjuïc. Here’s what we enjoyed the most.
Tortoise
Our top pick of the lineup was the performance by Tortoise, the legendary Chicago band that popularized the term post-rock in the nineties, and who made their fans wait almost 10 years to see them live again. After releasing ‘Touch’ in 2025 they returned to the scene with a tour that took them to the United States and Canada, followed by Europe this year.
On the main stage, and closing a perfect trilogy of shows that took place there -with Grand River and Fennesz preceding them- the quintet performed on Friday without guitarist Jeff Parker on this tour, and transported us with their sublime combination of genres on an instrumental journey that went through several moods. With a dream team on various percussion instruments led by Dan Bitney, John Herndon, and John McEntire, our best moments were the classic Ten-Day Interval, with its characteristic vibraphone, and Night Gang, the closing track from their latest album released through Chicago-based International Anthem and Nonesuch Records.
Grand River
The Italian-Dutch artist Aimée Portioli, better known as Grand River, kicked off our festival experience on Friday evening. With a packed house on the event’s busiest day, she presented her album ‘Temporary,’ to be released on Editions Mego on November 20th, with lighting design by Andrea Familiari. The album’s live debut had been just two weeks prior at the Venice Biennale.
Starting a couple of minutes earlier than announced, she built momentum, immersing the audience in a deep trance with sequential synthesizer melodies like in ‘Come to stay’, harmonics emanating from her guitar sometimes played with a bow like in ‘The crossing of the body, the crossing of the mind’, and piano sounds in songs like ‘Maybe I am dead and this is paradise’. Adding layers of resonance and verging on distortion, she built a powerful momentum on ‘The crossing of the body, the crossing of the mind’ and the sweet opening of ‘Let me know when you’re pure’, captivating the audience till the last moment.
Space Afrika
A top-tier presentation for us was definitely Space Afrika on day 2 of the festival. The duo of Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle Reid played the Dice stage early on Saturday, and took everyone on an introspective and atmospheric trip. We’ve seen them before, but after this experience we’ve realized just how integral a proper soundsystem is to their music, the way they work on modulating frequencies is just something else, it was a slow and deep bass grandeur at times.
The work they presented was accompanied by a compilation of looping found footage, overlaid with iterative texts that felt personal, distorted by memory and a bit like surveillance. When experiencing the work in deep listening one could find new sounds and meaning at every turn, hypnotic and encapsulating.
Touring their new album ‘Quiet Storm’ (Dais Records), the Manchester duo arrived at Mira following shows in Belgium and Italy, and turned the back stage of the festival into a threshold that would connect to a different state of mind. With their monochrome visuals of suburban environments playing on three screens, they portrayed a very specific feeling that gave shelter to those in need of this type of expression and weren’t aware of it. Peak moments during their set for us were ‘Regards’, ‘Vanity’, a song with vocals from the soprano Axelle Fanyo and ‘Ballad For A’G’’, with RXKNephew throwing verses like ‘I’m in a deep state, I’m too far gone right now’.
Fennesz & Lillevan
One of the highlights on the main stage on Friday was the concert commemorating the 25th anniversary of Endless Summer, Christian Fennesz’s iconic album on Editions Mego. In a set prepared with visual artist Lillevan, a founding member of the group Rechenzentrum, who has previously collaborated with Fennesz on his Mosaic and Mahler Remixed shows, we were treated to an hour of the Austrian musician’s best work.
We waited many years to finally hear this classic album with its characteristic effects on the electric guitar. Immersing 1960s pop structures in a labyrinth of digital processes, Fennesz casts sonic adventures through a very particular lens that took him years to define. Let’s not forget that achieving that sound in the late 1990s relied heavily on a tedious combination of hardware manipulation, manual tape/sampler editing, and primitive software, processes now effortlessly automated with modern software and plug-ins.
It was a hypnotic set with visuals that complemented and even expanded the music full of warm, analog tones that Fennesz effortlessly achieved. Tracks like ‘Caecilia’ and ‘Happy Audio’ were an absolute delight. It’s also worth mentioning the stage design for this set, we were most of the concert on the first row, but once we headed back for a moment we realized just how beautiful the panoramic visuals were, a bit more picturesque and less futuristic than the ones he had during his Mosaic presentations some time ago. The combination with Lillevan really enhances the experience. A packed house, and a warm-up for Tortoise, what could have been better?
Martin Rev
For us, one of the most anticipated acts that we were also unsure what to expect…
the legendary Martin Rev, founding member of the iconic band Suicide with Alan Vega. For his performance on the Dice stage, the 78-year-old musician brought along the video artist with whom he has been working for over a decade: Divine Enfant.
Perhaps one of the most punk and fun-filled shows we’ve seen in this context in a long time, the visual presentation lived up to the expectations, and the mere presence of Martin Rev, whose face was covered by a ski mask -or something similar- drove the audience wild. Synth punk, techno punk, visceral sounds while pounding the keyboard with effects, and electro and 80s vibes at times. The set, which ran longer than announced, had it all. There were bits of Suicide and also of his solo work (like material from the album ‘To Live’, released in 2003), also making room for some slow transitions that generated a great trip among the crowd. Unexpected is accurate in describing this pioneer of sound, that kept the audience on their toes and dancing. At the finale of his set we were treated to a latin rhythm and his interpretation of Tito Puente. Out of this world.
Max Cooper
Our first encounter with Max Cooper was during the fourth edition of Mira Festival in 2014 at the Fabra i Coats venue in the Sant Andreu neighborhood. His intense and hypnotic live audiovisual performance was the emotional peak of our night back then. Beginning with string arrangements, he constantly sought the point of convergence between the dancefloor and the treasures of techno’s more experimental side. A bliss for every IDM lover. Warm and melodic, intense and entertaining.
Twelve years and seven studio albums later, we met him again on the main stage on Friday, with an even more impressive set that he has been adapting to various venues on an extensive tour presenting his latest work, ‘Feeling Is Structure,’ which in November alone has him in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Japan, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. With a dual and immersive system of visuals, he achieved 3D effects in several parts of his set, which steadily increased the BPM until reaching the limits of hard techno, and featured incredible moments such as during his track ‘Spike’, with a video by Yoshi Sodeoka, ‘Order from Chaos (Atmos Version)’ from his album Emergence, and ‘Ebb And Flow’, from his latest work whose visuals, featuring pixelated sunsets and birds over the ocean, were among the highlights of the night.
There were other fantastic things during Mira, with over 30 shows and performances, and more than a dozen installations. Besides the powerful glitchwork of Ryoichi Kurosawa on Friday and the perfect combination of Nosaj Thing and Daito Manabe on Saturday, we enjoyed a good number of artists from the local scene, such as the legendary DJ Zero, resident DJ Tutu with Vj Roc, and the duo Del Gesù, in addition to festival classics like the Onionlab studio.
The installations
A classic of the festival is the space that they dedicate to some amazing futuristic installations. There was no Mira Dome this time, but in the downtime between shoes we really enjoyed the sci-fi feel of Alexis Choplain’s kinetic work ‘Hydroscope’, where metal modules connect hydraulic systems, transducers and light sources to turn sound vibrations into visible movement. We also talked with a rebellious AI trapped inside a computer in an interactive installation set in a 1970s office, called Parallel Self, courtesy of Ramon Prat Gibert.
We were amazed by ‘Quan ja no Existeixin els Humans’ (When Humans No Longer Exist), the work of Flowers By Bornay and Manel Quintana that had a certain Lynchian aspect to it, we also tripped-out with the lasers of ‘Bosc Sintètic’, the light installation by the Eyesberg Studio, and had a relaxing time with Laia Tarragó and Pol Martín’s piece around hand painting and animation reworking Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Wild Swans’, for a digital puppet theatre.
Article by A. Sixta & Paranoid
Photo Credits: Alba Rupérez (Max Cooper, Fennesz & Lillevan) , Xarlene (Tortoise, Grand River, Martin Rev), Leafhopper (Installations), Sixta & Paranoid (Space Afrika)
