If life changes, Ferran Palau (Esparraguera, 1984) is more alive than ever. In his octavo he abandoned his bass and drum songs, without losing the poetic and enigmatic character of his lyrics, he introduced personal positions in the face of a raw, unfair and rough world and managed to make his paused music seem to float pregnant on a smooth instrumental fabric where there are neither guitar solos nor guitar solos. reverberations. If it matches your closest, most intimate voice, “something tiny in a spacious landscape,” it helps define the sound of Happy birthdayalbum which will be released on platforms on the day of his 43rd birthday, the 24th birthday. The vinyl record has been on sale for a few weeks now. Especially the discussions in his house in Collbató, under the imposing shadow of Montserrat.
Question. What happened in your life to explain such an evolution?
Answer. The life of the señales that you must follow. What you feel or what comes to mind are clues that you have not ignored. On the one hand, the world has changed a lot in a short time and a few months ago I felt stupid singing my songs on a special about Gaza and I thought I needed to reorient the way I write. However, the pain that limits hearing and sounds intensified, and the sounds became loud in my brain, so much so that the bass and drums became an unbearable noise. Plus, every time I look for answers, I find them removing elements of my music, stripping it bare.
P. Reading his words in the tradition that was created, they still sound like personal reflections on love, heartbreak, death or the past of time.
A. If I can read it that way and it sounds good to me, I never want to be too explicit about the meaning of what I’m singing about, but I’m not interested in clarifying it, Hey, how about this? talk about hypernormality in the midst of the collapse of a system like ours, Bang bang this is the result of a sexist murder, Jo al tu lloc tells a story that I don’t explain about euthanasia, So happy reflect on the empathy of others, of people from the past and A sunny day think about losing your relationship in an accident. The first sentence I wrote on the album is “I keep silent about so many things“, the first one that suena. These are songs that make me feel in my place in the face of societal changes, but they are not protest songs.
P. These are no longer explicit or bellicose messages.
A. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in an explicit message, I think then the songs remain three-dimensional, if they become something flat. I respect you, but don’t come with me. I don’t see much, I can’t talk about it and what’s more, I’m contradictory, it’s normal to live in this society. There are many things that I relate to spirituality. For me, faith is a dogma, an immovable answer, a prison, while spirituality is the opposite, embracing it and I have no idea and yet I can live despite it. Spirituality is living in uncertainty, being here knowing that we are nothing and we know nothing. The fe is the immediate answer to all existential doubts, a catalog of solutions, and in some cases childish. Religion seems fascinating to me and Sacred wound (album released in 2015) is full of religious references, but it is more spiritual than religious.
P. After apparent accidents there have been explanations that contradicted what was coincidental, but this time a change in direction in the writing coincided with a loss of sound that made the voices and messages more present.
A. This album is calm, among other things, because of my disorder. I’ve had it for years, since the 20’s, and the sound has gotten worse and the sounds have become more distorted. In addition, healthy air is also affected and is increasingly deteriorating. That’s why even when driving me he has to use spark plugs because the noise of the engine bothers me. This is to avoid rapid deterioration. For years there was nothing, and my bass and drums were deep. This time, coming out of the consultation, I thought that my music should also respond to these circumstances. For a long time, I felt like there was too much stuff in my sonic backpack.
P. Does illness limit you as a composer?
A. I don’t think I limit myself as a composer. The same as in the future, but not in the future. It’s accepting uncertainty because I’m embracing an activity that I can’t continue to do, even if I devote all my time and effort to it. I continue to invest in music. At the moment, it is not a problem to compose. Over the years, I feel lucky to have had an illness that led me to create a song that otherwise would not have made you famous today. La sordera has a direct influence on this album, but also on all my music.
P. The ever-changing complexity of the instrumentation, the absence of rhythm and the presence of the string vary in the way of singing, the voice seems closer.
A. Especially live. In the project studio I sing the voices of several people, I sing with Jordi Matas, my producer, guitarist and cousin, solo with him, who listens to it and by chance who listens to it and records it. I sing in a private relationship with a solo listener. However, we sing live for more people and it’s true that when we let go of the drums, the backbone, the rhythm disappears and falls into the words and the guitar chords.
P. And then the ethereal sound of the record.
A. The idea with Jordi, who is a maestro of sound, was to obtain a silky texture, a very close voice, very close in contrast with very reverberated background arrangements, we thought of something very small in a very large universe, a tiny pattern in a spacious landscape.
A. And very natural suena.
A. There is no machinery, no metronome, it is a scientifically human experiment at a time when the human element is a value in itself, whereas before it was not natural. There are no tunings or effects, one voice and one microphone, old countercultural elements, reverbed guitars that create spaces. Without floors, only spaces. One touch and the sound hangs in the air.
P. It’s also countercultural to release vinyl first and hit platforms weeks later.
A. I have never been a pamphleteer, but my artistic and daily acts are gestures: how we publish records, on which label, etc. Releasing a vinyl record dating from the months preceding its release on platforms is a position. The physical record is our sovereignty, the little land that belongs to the artists. What is an independent seal today? We depend on things we cannot control. For this vinyl, more than the liturgy, there is a message. Each vinyl is an insurance policy for my music which, on the ground, rests on a support which can disappear due to the closure of a platform.
P. ¿Is there the ghost of the portada? This evokes the one who used Sónar as an image in 2010.
A. This album, more than a change, undresses me, leaves it to the essentials, prunes the garden, returns to the heart of the song. The ghost is the person’s spirit. And when on the networks you always have to show your face, bringing out a ghost is evoking the presence there. We didn’t know about Sónar, but it’s curious that we picked it up right after what happened with the festival.
About The Author
