2023-11-18 07:31:26
Zahara and Martí Perarnau are released from their respective careers with _junoa joint musical project that they conceived as “a refuge against the onslaughts of the system”, especially from the music industry. The alliance between the singer and the musician, member of her band and leader of Mucho, resulted in an album _BCN626 centered in a room. Now they’re back with _BCN747a second album inspired by the trips they made after confinement and which exudes the pessimism caused by “the effluvia of capitalism». “Writing these songs makes us more peaceful and calm people”, says a duo who, in times of musical overproduction and rapid consumption, still believe in telling stories and listening to records from start to finish, “as if it were 1972”.
This Saturday they perform at the Girona Auditorium, as part of the High Season programme.
They say they have made a record about travel, but more than exoticism and adventure, but what it conveys is disenchantment and anger.
Zahara. It was born to talk about being able to travel again and go out after confinement. The problem was the contrast between what we remembered and wanted to relive and what blew up in our faces, a reality that didn’t excite us so much. We realized that we were part of a turbo-capitalist system that exploits you and makes you privileged to be able to travel but at the same time makes you observe all this decay with sadness. All of this pisses us off and we tried to explain it in a beautiful way, but the reality trumped the search for beauty.
Martí Perarnau. When we started traveling we didn’t realize that we too had changed. We wanted to see the beautiful part of the world, and that was what we did when we traveled, but when we came back and started writing what came out were the effluvia of capitalism that had been poisoning our bodies.
Are songs written during the travels or once digested?
MP We documented the trips with an analog camera and wrote tracks that were later used to make songs. The least beautiful part came later, in the analysis that involves writing lyrics for songs and all this pain was left there.
The album has a dystopian point, even.
Z. We really didn’t want to be so pessimistic, but the songs allow you to let off steam, to play imagining how to end up destroying everything, like when we sing that we deserve annihilation. It is pessimism with humor and resignation about what we have built together and what we are continually destroying. Sometimes the only solution is total destruction, to end people because we are despicable as living beings and we only produce chaos and barbarism. We live in a moment of no return, in this I am very pessimistic. Writing these songs makes us more peaceful and calm people, it frees you a lot because it’s a fiction beyond the everyday.
MP You dress everything up in hyperbole when you make a pop song, but the world quickly makes hyperbole a joke. I also feel this pessimism, but in our day-to-day life we are optimistic people, beings of light who enjoy life. Writing has something therapeutic, it makes us remove the pessimism that the world and the capitalist, neoliberal and conservative society supposes.
Anti-system pop fan?
PM Yes! (laughs) I think anti-system pop is more and more necessary. We are believers in the pop song and the melody and the most important band in our lives is the Beatles, but a part of the mainstream has a mania for stripping songs with a message or lyrics that say something. We believe pop is a great tool to convey ideas. When there are great melodies, great things can be said.
You dress everything up in hyperbole when you make a pop song, but the world quickly turns hyperbole into a joke
They launch these anti-system messages from within the system, however.
MP It’s totally contradictory, because we find ourselves thrown into it constantly. The disk is a shelter against the onslaught of the system. We are all prey to Spotify’s numbers, which have turned listening to music into a competition instead of a moment of introspection and self-discovery. We are very music freaks and we like to listen to records from start to finish like it’s 1972 and we’re so freaked out that we’re now figuring out how to mix and produce records. We did it all ourselves because of the obsession with solving the mysteries of making records.
Z. It’s that you don’t listen to music anymore, you consume it. We even express ourselves differently.
In an attempt to skip the rules of the industry, now that everyone is betting on the song, _juno proposes an album as a whole, that tells a story.
Z. We think that, just like us, there are still freaks out there who like to listen to whole records, in a good set, almost without talking… Surely there is still someone who wants to be told a story, not just given small 3 and a half minute pills to consume quickly. We admire beauty and we like that there is something behind it, we make a song and we know it will be linked to what we will do later. We’ve found a community of people who like this, respect it, and like to feel cared for.
MP We are the resistance (laughs).
Don’t they feel the pressure of the platforms?
Z. I have my own label and when I look at the statistics I see that the records are listened to very little, people only want the singles. That’s why I understand that this pressure ends up affecting large and small projects, we all want to live from this. This is the other great triumph of capitalism: you create a small project to do what you like, but to be able to do it you have to bend to the impositions of the system. And you think that, being small and independent, you do what you want, but it’s almost worse, because you give everything to give half in a world that keeps putting out songs to see which one hits.
Sounds hard to get back to.
Z. It’s that this goes beyond labels, it has entered the minds of independent artists and musicians, who say they produce. It’s all about consuming and producing music, it has nothing to do with enjoying, composing and creating, which is what music was for us, and all of that is disgusting to me.
MP There’s a beautiful part about tours and record signings, that people tell you they like you to go on a musical journey, because the concert is like a crazy journey with lots of instrumental and sensory moments. I used to say this about resistance as a joke, but there are many people who appreciate it and what used to be called underground and was seen in small rooms, now it’s about giving value to the album. Whoever wants to get on the bandwagon, even if they are few, will be welcome.
Zahara was in the running for her solo project for the Best Alternative Music Album award at the Latin Grammysdelivered this Thursday in Seville with Bizarrap, Natalia Lafourcade, Shakira and Karol G as big winners.
“I feel it as a recognition a some very complicated work, Get out i Repute, and I’m very proud as an independent label to have broken a barrier that seemed unbreakable to me”, she explains.
“When you’re there you realize that you’re tiny and there’s no need to be negative, because Latin American music is a giant. It’s been overwhelming and fun to be a part of that for a while,” he says.
#antisystem #pop #increasingly