Queridos fanes y fanas: no os dejéis engañar por la precaria calidad de nuestra imagen y sonido; realmente, nos dejamos la piel y el WiFi por regalaros cada lunes (o martes) unos videoinformativos tan rollo amateur, tan a lo grabado con Super 8 en 1986, tan entrañablemente desaliñados. Mientras grabábamos el episodio de esta semana, sin ir más lejos, se nos ha caído el Skype como veinte veces repartidas entre los dos (a Icaro Lavia, más, porque Mané López, quien ya es un youtuber famoso, tiene fibra óptica de la NASA y esas movidas).
La cuestión es que, tras haber leído vuestro feedback en la sección de comentarios del clip de la semana pasada, estamos más motivados que nunca para daros TODO lo que queréis EXCEPTO una cosa: no vamos a dejar de ser haters. Principalmente, porque no podemos, pero más principalmente aún porque sabemos que es el principal motivo por el que nos veis: os pone a cien que os provoquemos con nuestras desvergonzada y honesta ignorancia de la cultura musical.
Durante esta semana que acabamos de dejar atrás, también cayó por Muzikalia una noticia relacionada con los Smashing Pumpkins, pero como, gracias a los cursillos avanzados sobre historia de los Smashing Pumpkins con los que algunos de vosotros, queridos espectadores y espectadoras, nos obsequiasteis muy generosamente, ahora ya sabemos bastante sobre los Smashing Pumpkins y, consecuentemente, no es tan divertido hablar de ellos. A cambio, os ofrecemos nuestra desinformación acerca de Death Cab for Cutie y otra gente a la que sí controlamos un poco más, como, por ejemplo, Gorillaz, Kanye West, Los Planetas, Spiritualized, Rhye, MGMT, Vetusta Morla, Protomartyr, los Tiki Phantoms y algunos más. Y, tranquilos, que decimos que los controlamos un poco más cuando en realidad, tampoco tanto.
La única noticia que se le escapó a Muzikalia la semana pasada fue la de que, contra todo pronóstico, se ha sobrevivido al Primavera Sound 2018 (Icaro Lavia salió viva del mismo, y Mané López sostuvo la aleación profesional entre ambos durante la semana en la que su compañera estaba convaleciente). A parte de esa, están todas las buenas nuevas importantes, y entre ellas hemos hecho una exhaustivísima y dificilísima selección de las mejores, es decir, aquellas que tratan temas y/o gentes que, más o menos, nos suenan un poco.
Traemos frikadas, como las de Nick Cave a dueto con Kylie Minogue en plan balada romántica incómoda de Operación Triunfo. Tenemos personas que quieren sacar pasta a costa de otras personas muertas, como el lanzamiento de un álbum post mortem del rollo unplugged firmado desde el otro mundo por Prince. Tenemos también a otros supervivientes pero no del Primavera Sound, sino de la vida, como Rick Astley, Ronnie Spector, Interpol, Smashing Pumpkins y Bunbury, triunfando a través de los tiempos con giras, discos y rutas del bacalao, en el caso de el ex líder de Heroes del Silencio. Y, como siempre por estas fechas, se acerca la decimoquinta edición del Sónar y muchos muchos muchos conciertos de dimensiones varias más.
En fin, que lo sentimos por todos aquellos a los que les pareció buena idea lo de que Mané se encargara de la sección solo, pero hemos vuelto, y más unidos que nunca. Quien no se sienta capaz de aceptar este hecho, siempre puede volver a ver el capítulo de la semana pasada, que lo cierto es que mola especialmente.
La semana que acabamos de dejar atrás
no fue una caracterizada por su ajetreo sensacionalista, en lo que a artes
musicales se refiere. Y no hay nada malo en ello, pensamos Mané López e Icaro Lavia, por supuesto que
no. Simplemente, hay semanas en las que pasan más cosas que en otras, fin de la
cita, no hay más na, como dirían los amantes del reguetón (que, por
cierto, se cuentan por miles entre los lectores de Muzikalia, pero no lo
digáis, que es secreto).
No ha habido mucho que repasar en este segundo episodio
de nuestro humilde vlog, no… Bueno, sin contar lo de Goldfrapp marcándose
un dueto salvaje con Dave Gahan, claro. Y exceptuando también lo de los Arctic
Monkeys alzándose con el número uno en las listas
españolas con un disco tan polarizador como el Tranquility Base
Hotel & Casino, que es para mear
y no echar gota, la verdad. Con el AM no,
españoles, pero con esta cosa rara del hotel y el casino, sí, ¿verdad? No hay
quien entienda nada… Habría que quitar igualmente de la lista de cosas que no
han pasado en el panorama musical de la semana pasada lo de Public
Image Ltd celebrando su cuadragésimo aniversario con un
box set carísimo del copón y conmemorando en consecuencia la muerte oficial del
punk. Y casi se me olvida lo de los Rival Sons incorporándose
a última hora al Azkena Rock Festival y lo de The
xx en Bilbao… Oye, pues igual si que han pasado cosas esta
semana, al final, ¿no? Miraos el vídeo y así os enteráis mejor, que nosotros no
sabemos de los que escribimos, pero hacemos ver muy bien que sabemos de lo que
hablamos.
"Vivimos en una
sociedad muy cómoda, y eso nos ha convertido en seres que lo quieren todo y
ahora (no os estoy invocando, Arcade Fire; aún no se os perdona lo de vuestro
último disco), a poder ser para ayer y sin tener que esforzarnos mucho. Esto se
traduce en una generación de seres pasivos sometidos a los estímulos que llegan
desde maquinitas varias por doquier, sin proponérsenos la más mínima
oportunidad de autocrítica. “Todo está bien, no te desesperes”, que diría
Father John Misty.
No vamos a cambiar el
mundo en plan el humus o la Revolución Rusa (ya nos gustaría ser la mitad de
importantes que el humus en las vidas de la gente), pero sí que intentaremos
ofrecer una forma de pasar un rato del día un poco más amenamente. Porque,
seamos sinceros: nos da todo el palo sentarnos y tener que dedicar el 100% de
nuestra atención de mosquito deficiente en leer una noticia. Por eso preferimos
escuchar un programa de radio o los podcasts cutres de todos nuestros amigos
que se creen Orson Welles.
Por todo eso y mucho
más, a partir de hoy, Muzikalia amplía su rango de actuación: las noticias que
más nos han dado que hablar a lo largo de la semana se encontrarán recopiladas
en un vídeo de YouTube para el disfrute o disguste de todos.
Mané López e Icaro
Lavia se alían para sacarle punta a la actualidad
y criticar juntos la obra y gracia de los grupos tan admirados por las personas
que no se creen que saben tanto de música como nosotros. De entrada, no
prometemos mucho para decepcionar poco, pero podemos garantizar que somos
agradables a la vista y tenemos un encanto de esnobs de estar por casa que no
se puede aguantar. Así que nada; simplemente siéntate y disfruta mientras
comienza el despiece."
Pues esta vez ni Mané López ni yo salimos tan disgustados de nuestras respectivas escuchas cruzadas, sorprendentemente. Supongo que eso es malo teniendo en cuenta que el objetivo era amargarnos la vida mútuamente y crear mal rollo y agresividad, que es lo que les pone a los telespectadores de hoy en día, pero güeno...
Burna Boy está diver, y MGMT, para quien le gusten los discos malillos, también merece la pena, así que os dejamos por aquí nuestro ejercicio de orientación en tiempos en los que la crítica musical es más necesaria que nunca.
Posthumanism approaching. Robots play
the violin better than your cousin already, and it’s a matter of time that they
will take over everything else. A final android planetary crusade is just a
click away, as it is the resurrection of a tinplate-bodied David Bowie with a short-circuited talent. No, this is not the
pretext for a musical version of Terminator 7, but the latest oracle from David Tattersall, songwriter, singer
and guitarist for The Wave Pictures.
On the occasion of their new album release, Bamboo Diner in the Rain, as well as their forthcoming Spanish
tour, we catch up with the three incombustible from Leicestershire about Deep
Blue versus Gary Kasparov, the Internet possibly being Satan on Earth, Bob Dylan’s much undeserved Nobel prize
and, in general, how marvellous the Wave Pictures are in every sense of the
word and how full of shit all the rest seem to be. But these are just
opinions, mind you.
Being the
Wave Pictures such a famously prolific band since their very early and
even-more-unpolished-than-now beginnings, 2016 has been a particularly inspired
year even by your standards; before Bamboo Diner in the Rain last month came A Season in Hull in February, recorded with one microphone, no mixing and
released only in vinyl. Don’t you think you have it tough enough these days, as
a guitar-driven act in a contemporary music landscape widely dominated by
computers? What was the intention behind this bold (if not self-sabotaging)
move?
I wanted to make something that was
not for the Internet. To me, it’s a very romantic idea. It's like a message in
a bottle that you throw out to the sea. To listen to those songs, you have to
listen to the vinyl record. It sounds really wonderful and I was very proud of
the songs and I think it's a very lovely idea. I don't like the Internet anyway.
I'm sick to death of it. It is eating away at everything that I like.
It seems
like your trademark productiveness is not a quality that can be generally
applied to most bands that fall under the category of rock of some sort,
especially compared to the never-ending flow of work produced by their hip hop
and electronic counterparts. Do you perceive a creative drought in the current
state of rock?
Yes, I do. In fact, I think that there
is very little music in any genre that is being made with fire in its belly.
Everything seems complacent and commercialised, not just in rock but across the
board. Everyone lives in their own little box. They have forgotten that music
is for fun, and for expressing yourself. The robots have taken over the place.
It would be very easy now to replace human beings altogether.
Bamboo
Diner in the Rain is similarly described and felt as a battle “against the
robot music apocalypse”. What is it that you categorize as “robot music” and
why is it something that should be confronted? Or rephrased from a constructive
point of view: why is an instrument-based recording style still worth reclaiming?
You want to hear the human spirit on
tape. Machines can beat a man at chess, machines will soon beat a human
football team at football. They will undoubtedly soon fight our wars for us,
and not long after rise up against us, as you see predicted in the Terminator
movies. People have a terrible weakness for technology. They think that
machines can do everything better than people can. This is not true of the
arts. A machine will never be able to play music like Skip James. Skip James
was a true genius and his music could never be created by a machine. But people
have been tricked into believing that people like David Bowie are great geniuses. Actually, David Bowie's music could be made by machines at some point. It is
not unfeasible. If a computer can beat Kasparov, surely a computer could make Hunky Dory? I think I fear these
developments and I think that the human spirit is the principle element that you
want to hear on a recording. That's what it boils down to: the human spirit.
Personal expression. Is someone expressing themselves? Does it move me? All the
rest is just cleverness and commercialism.
You guys
have talked repeatedly, and again in the means of pin-pointing the influences
of this new album, about the impact that blues and other forms of primitive
black American music has had in the Wave Pictures. Why do you think blues has
historically appealed to British kids more than to younger generations in the
US? With the likes of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Alexis
Korner and many more being regarded as the ultimate blues saviours during the
1960s.
I think that's something to do with
the racial segregation that existed in America, nothing to do with music.
Having
experimented with cover albums already, as you did with Daniel Johnston’s
Artistic Vice in 2014 during a recording and two-week tour under Houston
Party’s initiative “We Used to Party”, have you ever thought about publishing a
collection of your own blues and American folk favourites? If so, how would the
potential track list look like? I’ve heard you tried with the Stones’ England’s
Newest Hitmakers, for instance, which includes some bluesy covers itself.
I think that Robert Johnson has truly extraordinary songs, the poetry is
exceptional and mysterious. This is in addition to his extraordinary,
supernatural guitar and vocal abilities. I have often thought of covering his
songs, but instead I get inspired to write my own songs when I listen to him.
The Wave
Pictures have been recurrently described as a band that writes songs for fans
of songwriting, referring to the more often than not abstract, melancholic and
complex nature of your lyrics. Anybody from an outer perspective would agree
that this obscurantist motivation is still palpable in Bamboo Diner in the
Rain, but as the creative minds behind it, what, if anything, would you say has
changed about the way you wrote the songs for this album, style and
subject-wise?
No, I don't write songs for fans of
songwriting. I don't write them for anyone. I write them for myself. It's a
fluke that later anyone likes them.
But when you are writing, you cannot
think about what anyone else thinks, otherwise you will go wrong. It's enough
to try to get it correct for yourself. You become addicted to this, and that's
all there is to it. Then, afterwards, it's good if other people like it, but it
isn't the essential part. Furthermore, I don't have any obscurantist motivation.
I just have a motivation to make up songs. You put all your eggs in that
basket, you put all your focus on it, and then you disregard absolutely
everything else that would get in the way of doing it. And as long as you
disregard everything that will stop you it is very easy and pleasant. Everyone
wants to slow you down with theories and with work. That's the way people are.
But as long as you focus, it is easy. It is not difficult. It is a great
pleasure! You just have to block out all the other voices, then it's like
turning on a tap and the water comes rushing out. I turn on the songwriting tap
and out come the songs!
However, to write songs you need
solitude and contemplation and I think that with the amount of time people
spend on the Internet now, and with the Internet on their phones, there will be
no solitude for people, and no good songs. I like to take long walks in the
city myself. I think solitude is the most important rule of songwriting.
I have solitude. I have been able to
make great advances in the song. I changed the syntax of songwriting
altogether. I broke every rule of lyric writing that there was. I always did
this. Nobody does it the way I do it. I'm a better poet than Bob Dylan. I was better than Bob Dylan at writing lyrics when I was
14 years old. I already knew at that age that you had to break the form. You
had to break the form to give it life. What you want to get is not a reflection
of life, but something as vivid as life itself, that in and of itself is as
alive and as real as anything in the real world. Not a picture of life, but
life itself. Truth itself. No one can
touch my lyrics. They can't even understand them!
Three out
of ten of the songs in Bamboo Diner in the Rain distinctively stand out for
their non-blues infused sound: Bamboo Diner Rag, Meeting Simon at the
Airport (the only instrumental piece in the entire album) and the title track, Bamboo Diner in the Rain. Why did you deem appropriate to place these more
folkish, Appalachian-reminiscent tunes in the context of an otherwise
straightforward house-rocking electric blues album?
I wanted the emotional heart of the
album to be instrumental, to focus the listener on what the guitar was saying,
to make them listen to the guitar as if it was a voice. I thought it worked
personally, though I don't know whether people thought it. The heart of the
album is Meeting Simon at the Airport because is it the most moving, the most
emotional moment. That is the heart. It was an experiment, I like to experiment
and to release the experiments.
The heart of the album is Meeting
Simon at the Airport and the soul of the album is Bamboo Diner in the Rain.
The whole album takes place within that song. It is the title track. It
presents the key to everything that has unfolded before it. It is a very
beautiful song. Mystery and emotion.
As for Bamboo Diner Rag, it seems
totally real to me. I think you perhaps wouldn't consider it blues, but in fact
it is a blues piece. It’s a blues piece in the ragtime style of Reverend Gary Davis. East Coast Blues, guys like Blind Blake, Barbecue Bob and Sylvester Weaver, they did a lot of blues pieces in this kind of style. I think we nailed
it. I love that piece. I was very proud of it. If you want to learn more,
there's a very good compilation album called The Rough Guide to East Coast Blues.
We opened up something inside of
ourselves on this album, and we found there was a lot more in there than we had
realised. I don't think anyone has ever put this kind of instrumental together
with the kind of songs we do. I think it’s a totally original album, which I
realise, does not interest anybody at all!
A sublime
video for Now I Want to Hoover My Brain Clean, second single of the album,
has just been recently released. Some of the most popular Wave Pictures’ clips succeed
in pulling out very conceptually intelligent and subtle ideas in a lo-fi,
rustic format (the one for “I Love You Like a Madman” comes to mind instantly
as a very illustrative example). To which extent are you involved in the
creative process of making these videos?
I hate music videos. To me, they are
an insult to the art form. When you buy a novel, you don't get given a CD of
music to listen to while you read it. Why should music have videos? It is
saying that music is not interesting enough on its own, you need a film as well
otherwise you will be bored. I hate them. I appear in them only to be nice and
helpful. I have no interest in what they look like and I don't like to watch
them. If you like one, it is the work of the director, not me. Same if you
don't like it. I wish they didn't exist, not just for me but for anyone.
Personally, I like to listen to music without a film to accompany it. Or I like
to watch a proper film.
It’s been
announced that you’ll be playing Primavera Sound 2017! Next year’s line-up
has been an unbeatable surprise for some and a bit of a disappointment for
others. I’ve been told you guys are not crazy about festivals as attendees, but
what’s your opinion on it so far? Looking forward to seeing any specific band?
I don't like festivals because I think
they should be free. I think that the idea of festivals should be free events
for the local community. Instead they are terribly expensive. I think a nice
hippie idea has been commercialised out of all recognition. I think people are
being ripped off, robbed in broad daylight. There is no community spirit to
festivals, just money men selling the faded image of Woodstock to new
generations.
Last but
not least, and as Nardwuar the Human Serviette would ask, why should people
care about the Wave Pictures?
It's not for me to say. You can't beg people
to like you! I can tell you my opinions, but they aren't worth any more than
anybody else's. I really love The Wave Pictures. I think we're truly
exceptional and totally original. I think we’re really a band of exceptional
genius. I think that everyone else is full of shit. I think they've got shit
coming out of their ears, they’re so full of shit. I think The Wave Pictures
are the real deal. Totally honest. Pure genius. Pure innovation and invention.
I think we are true artists, magicians, shamans, wizards. Gods. But this is
just my opinion. Lee aquí la entrevista en español con The Wave Pictures para Muzikalia.
