2023-05-04 00:58:12
A light bulb hangs in the number 6 fire station in the Californian town of Livermore. Nothing surprising. Except for the fact that it has been on for almost 120 years, it is the light bulb that has lasted the longest and a tourist attraction that has broken Guinness records. Known as the ‘Centenary Light Bulb’ it has become a striking object in contrast to the speed of our time and disposable products.
Based on a game with this concept, the composer and guitarist Víctor Antón chose the title of his album, ‘Centennial Light’, which he presents this Sunday at the Dazz (8:00 p.m., 10 euros) together with the pianist Juan Sebastián Vázquez, the bassist Javier Moreno and Naíma Acuña on drums. “The metaphor of the centenary light bulb helps me to vindicate the artistic process as something lasting,” says the musician who has previously set foot in the Cuchillería street venue with the singer María Sedano. “It’s a great place that I’ve also been to as an audience,” acknowledges the artist who lives in Valladolid and teaches at the Centro Superior Música Creativa (Madrid).
The return of this man from Zamora to the capital of Álava –now with his name in large letters on the poster– occurs with his third album. He had previously released ‘Motion’ and ‘Changing gears’. Among the repertoire of songs from ‘Centennial Light’ are songs like ‘Planned Obsolescence’, about that useful life that most products and even some products in the music industry have, or ‘Best Things in Life’, in around the little things that fill you up. «I like to compose from the concrete, even though the music is abstract. It helps me to do it based on a more political, social or other idea.
– A curiosity. He studied Philosophy. How have those studies helped you in his musical career?
– I don’t know, honestly, it’s not an easy question (he thinks about it). In general, it helps life and to think things a little more broadly and to think more deeply. I don’t want to get pedantic and deep. But you can spin a bit with the concept of the album. I vindicate the creative process that, in the case of a musician who plays his own music, is being built and needs to rest and think about things. It’s not how we consume music. Now we are not able to listen to a whole album.
The way Antón talks about his work reveals a great passion that seems to radiate from many of his compositions. Philosophy studies, in fact, started from a “pure restlessness” that he had when he was young. “I had a very good teacher in high school and I was good at reading and writing,” he justifies about the reasons for this enrollment of an artist who had already graduated professionally in piano. And he changed the keys for the strings around the age of 15, first self-taught and, later, at Musikene and at the hands of teachers like Chris Cheek or Michael Kanan.
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