10,000 kilometres away from Barcelona, but just like at home. Primavera Sound closes two weeks of an intense Latin American route with the absolute certainty that the urban festival model that it has shaped over two decades in its original site not only attracts visitors from all over the world but can also be exported to other parts of the globe that embrace the spirit to the point of making it their own. It’s not about arriving, setting up the stages and leaving a few days later; it’s something else. It is something that can be seen, breathed and, above all, heard. It is Primavera Sound, wherever it is held.
That which seems so abstract, so difficult to define until you experience it, has become a reality these days in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile: the three cities have undeniably hosted a Primavera Sound with all its letters. The very same ones that have been displayed in the form of iconic illuminated signs in the Anhembi District, in Costanera Sur and in the Parque Bicentenario Cerrillos, although in reality this triple debut in Latin America has been felt far beyond the locations where the main days have been held. Because Primavera Sound is a musical explosion that floods out of any site to filter through the whole city, in concert venues, diverse spaces and hidden corners that are now part of the history of the twentieth anniversary of the festival.
The celebrations began in the Parc del Fòrum five months ago and have been adding new participants from all over the world. In Brazil, Argentina and Chile, as in Barcelona, the anniversary has had a multiple soundtrack, which is impossible to label and at the same time 100% its own. And with its unwavering rules: the commitment to a gender-balanced and plural lineup to ensure that the same healthy reality is also felt by the audience in front of the stage. This celebration of twenty years of career has also ended up being a celebration of the only musical present imaginable. A passionate, liberating and unprejudiced one like the one seen over these two weeks, one where Primavera Sound works as a unifying agent for a whole global community. Things happen around its line-up that don’t happen elsewhere.
From the rock maturity of Arctic Monkeys in their first concerts after the release of The Car to the eternal return to the future of Björk, passing through Lorde and her pop talent, the encounter with the urban superstar Travis Scott, the hyper choruses by Charli XCX, the singer-song writing that Father John Misty, Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski embody in their various forms, the generational anthems of Interpol and the inimitable universe of Arca, jumping from line-up to line-up in these first three editions has brought reaffirmations of all kinds, and also discoveries from here and there. National talent was perfectly represented and via Bad Gyal, Amaia, Los Planetas and Carolina Durante triumphing on the other side of the Atlantic, the events in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile have strengthened the Primavera Sound community by strengthening musical connections in all directions even facing the severe weather together when necessary.
Three new festivals with their own enriching features, but perfectly recognisable: the Primavera Sound audience, wherever they are from, wherever they are coming from, identify with each other. This seems patently obvious after these two weeks of concerts, but it is worth remembering that the 120,000 attendees in the Brazilian city, the 120,000 in the city of Buenos Aires and the 100,000 in the Chilean capital are moved by music. The music that until now they listened to from 10,000 kilometres away, and the music they have been much closer to these days.
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