You Medellin kids! A vibrant weekend at Colombia's new festival

"Have you seen Narcos?", a friend immediately asked as he as he walked into my top-floor hotel room and took in the decidedly top-class view over Medellín, Colombia's verdant, hilly second city. "Because this view is the opening scene of Narcos."

He was right, but that was where my trip's similarities with the lawless Medellín of days gone by began and ended during a thoroughly enjoyable long weekend in the capital of the Antioquia region.

The place notorious as the "most dangerous city on earth" during the 1980s heyday of Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel has undergone a major image change in recent times, and it isn't difficult to see why. El Poblado, the southern district I stayed in, could be a hip area of Barcelona or Brooklyn, with excellent coffee shops and clothes boutiques and some of the best restaurants (I'm looking at you, Alambique and Clandestino) I've been to in a long time. There are undoubtedly still dangerous areas in Medellín, but the same could be said for just about any big city, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the place as a holiday destination.

SIMS (Selina International Music Summit) was the first instalment of a highly ambitious new project from Selina, a rapidly expanding hotel/hostel company with a burgeoning list of locations around Latin America (I stopped in at their location in the amazing Bocas del Toro area of Panama on my way to Medellín), and that will soon expand into North America and Europe too. The highly successful core idea of Selina is to provide accommodation that ranges from hostel-style dorms to high-end (but still relatively affordable) hotel rooms in a single building, along with co-working spaces, bar and cafe areas and, in the case of Selina Medellín and several other locations, small recording studios.

The idea for SIMS had been settled upon just two months before this inaugural edition happened over a weekend in March – an extraordinary fact given the logistical demands of a three-day music festival – and the happy but very evident exhaustion of some of its organisers was testament to the near-sleepless few weeks that had been necessary to bring everything together. The main part of each day's programme took place in three rooms of Selina's recently opened Medellín location (“we installed your sink a couple of hours ago”, a grinning member of the team explained as I was shown to my room). The main ground-floor bar area (the Playground) and an immediately adjacent room (Monasterio) served as the two “main” stages, and the third was in the car park upstairs, with the latter affording an unexpectedly delightful view of the city through its open back.

Colombian or Colombia-based artists formed the entire bill, with a lot of garage-rock and hip hop complemented by a reasonable spread of other styles including electro-pop, post-rock and funk. The Playground was almost entirely rock-focused, with El Nuevo Coyote (above) and La Banda del Bisonte impressing early on.

Upstairs in the Car Park the first act I saw, Hombre Memoria, surprised me with a deliciously glacial, slightly woozy strain of post-rock evocative of Mogwai. The Car Park park played host to several of my favourite moments across the weekend, from the no-nonsense dance-punk of Room Raiders to the vibrant soul/jazz/rap of the pink-haired female solo artist Mabiland. My favourite of all were the trio Mr Bleat (below), who are highly regarded in the city and showed why with an excellent hour of electro-pop topped off with the striking vocals of their singer Sara Rodas.

On the hip hop side, Thursday's second-to-last and last acts in Monasterio, Crudo Means Raw and Doble Porcion (below) were great value, with the latter duo combining solid beats and flow with instinctive stage interplay. Profetas, a Bogotá band who played in Monasterio late on Saturday and were one of the best-known names at the festival, fused local aesthetics and instrumentation with funk, reggae and rap to the delight of a dense, energetic crowd. The closing acts on all three stages on Saturday turned out to be strong, with Mabiland's Parking Lot set followed by another of the Bogotá contingent, the duo MITÚ in Monasterio, who managed a fair approximation of their musical aim to “recreate the landscape of the jungle through a combination of palenquero roots music and electronic wizardry”. Last in the Playground were another duo, El Sabor (below, bottom), whose expertly harnessed melee of percussion and electronics was my favourite moment of the whole festival.

Outside of its main bill, SIMS also had a club programme down the street at Salón Amador, one of the city's best club spaces and a regular stopoff for well-regarded European and American acts (Guti and Anja Schneider will appear there in the next week or two). On a couple of nights the place was too crowded and hot to linger in for long – symptoms of both Medellín's party-town status and the huge excitement around SIMS in the city itself. Of the DJ sets I did catch, Isabella Roldán, who found room for moments as big and classic as Green Velvet's La La Land in a riotously fun 90 minutes, and the moodier tech-house of Caro Fox, were the standouts.

SIMS also took the “conference” part of its raison d'etre very seriously, with a packed programme of talks and discussion panels preceding the music each day. In Europe and the US these things can often seem a bit tacked on and irrelevant, but they appeared to be genuinely useful here, and many of the artists who played at the festival attended and apparently took home useful tips on production, getting themselves noticed outside Colombia, and so on. Time will tell what Selina decide to do with SIMS in the future – whether it becomes a festival for international acts or remains a showcase for Colombian talent – but for now its organisers can be immensely satisfied with having pulled off a highly successful inaugural event at bracingly short notice, in a truly fascinating setting.