Delete @ Gwdihw, Cardiff
Sun 30 July
When writing about music, beware the danger of getting caught up in the moment. A lag of days, or even weeks, between you hitting ‘send’ and your verbiage being distributed to the wider world may make it seem outdated and irrelevant. A common blooper is when a review hails a song as being “just in time for summer,” or words to that effect, except by the time it makes it to print it’s started pissing down again, because we live in Britain.
It’s an understandable impulse, though, when the weather has so much to do with how we consume sounds. I’m writing this next to a window full of beautiful cloudless sky and my next door neighbour’s parasol, and listening to Sonja Moonear (who I’ll get to shortly, don’t worry, I’ve got 350 words) ahead of her first ever appearance in Cardiff, an outdoor alldayer round the back of Gwdihw. The set is the most important factor, of course, but only a little more than the setting.
Hailing from rural Switzerland, Sonja currently lives in Geneva and earns her keep partly from DJing, partly from her day job as a sound engineer for French-language TV station Radio Télévision Suisse. With this in mind, it perhaps makes sense that her approach to minimal techno is detailed, precise and rewards patience – not, however, the one-paced greyscale chug that often gives minimal a bad name. Wading into the Swiss rave scene (such as the Mental Groove collective) as a 90s teenager, before long she got a taste for mixing and production herself.
A big break arrived in 2002, when she was booked at Berlin’s Panoramabar to play seminal minimal shindig Perlonized; it turned into an epic deck-sharing session with the rest of the bill, including Ricardo Villalobos, and Sonja’s recognition factor mushroomed from there. She’s played on every continent where techno packs ‘em in, intermittently releases 12”s on her Ruta5 label, and recently teamed up with Carl Craig on a double mix album for the Cocoon stable. Her set for Delete should be a blissful centrepiece of a day which also features Marc Parsons, Matt Owen and Kofi Tarris.
Tickets: £18. Info: 029 2039 7933
words NOEL GARDNER