They say they feel lucky to be talking about their new album, and it seems so given the loquacity that Zahara and Martí Perarnau give off when talking about _BCN747, the second project they present as _Juno. Yeah, like that, with the annoying dash in front of it that they had to add to get the copyright on the name. It costs them visits on the net, they admit it, but they don't care because they had to be called Juno, as they had to release this second album as a result of their experiences traveling the world after the pandemic, discovering new realities filtered by electronic sound to give rise to a personal and social reflection narrated to the rhythm of techno rooms, to which this couple are regulars until they almost, almost, fall exhausted with happiness. Anyone who wants to fall in with them can go to the Auditori this Friday (9:00 p.m.) to see them perform at the Mil·leni Festival.
_BCN747 was born from the idea of a trip
Zahara: The previous album, _BCN626, is more traditional, it talks about a couple in a room, and we started composing this one just when we can travel again after the pandemic. We begin to observe the calendar, where there are many trips ahead of us that become reasons to make songs. There was an intention to talk about our trips and capture it at the beginning much more from the romanticism of how beautiful it is to go to those places and travel. But after returning from those trips when we began to write, the contrast between what we imagined and what we saw was much harsher, for better and for worse.
You go on a tour and from there you come back with some points on a map, in Chile, Mexico, the United States, Tokyo...
Martí: We were never able to go to Tokyo, it stays precisely like The Song You're Not Going to Do Today, because it's the one we were left waiting for.
Z: But we were able to go to Amsterdam, London, I don't know if Berlin is in the songs but it was in the trips.
M: We wanted to escape from that confinement that was confinement and produce Puta's album. Not only were they trips motivated by Zahara's concerts in Mexico City, we also took other trips. What was implicit is the desire to run away and look for something new that we couldn't find inside our house, we had to discover what music was like having inputs from outside, after confinement.
Z: Mexico was for the tour, and then the United States that we took advantage of from there. But we went to Amsterdam to see Low, in London we've been to many raves, and Barcelona, which is also the protagonist of this album even though we live in Madrid, even though Martí is Catalan and I have lived here. That BCN747 is the room we were in when we played here last time.
I thought the 747 was for the plane
M: No, but it was just the 747 and we liked the plane. It was the real room where we stayed for three or four days when we came to play at the Barts room presenting the first album, when they closed everything at three in the afternoon, the Gothic was empty.
Z: We spent many hours in the hotel, because nothing could be done. That song was one of the first stones of this record.
Is there a link between the two albums, a conceptual continuity?
Z: The first one is called like that because the song that the project generates is _BCN626 precisely because of a trip that also takes place in Barcelona, which ends up having a lot of weight in the project. That first record is all songs that talk about being in a room and we liked to geolocate it there. In _BCN747 we decided that it was 747 because of what you say about the flight, that it was a plane and that this record is about travel. And we already turned around when we saw that 7:47 was a fantastic time to leave the rave that could end at 8 in the morning.
M: The time when the dj is playing the last song and one of the songs, when I arrived I was already there, it speaks of that limbo where we die, and in our case when we die, we remain anchored in that last song that the DJ is putting on in the disco before turning on the lights and for us it was 7:47. We put everything around those figures.
Raves is another of the themes that runs through the album
M: Going to raves or techno clubs is a way to free ourselves and heal our hearts a bit to the rhythm of that black drum and forget about the stress of everyday life. I have been a fan of going to concerts, I still am, but suddenly I have that feeling again that I had when I was a teenager and I saw the first concerts full of mystery, of not knowing exactly what is happening on stage.
Z: When I first experienced electronics it seemed like an experience close to meditation. If you are in the right club, nobody talks to you, there are no motives, you feel a lot of freedom, a lot of possibilities to express yourself as you are. Even Martí feels that way, and I say Martí because he is a straight name, because especially at raves what you see are many queer people liberating themselves and being themselves. As a woman, if I'm hot and I end up without clothes, I know that nothing will happen to me. It is a place of absolute freedom, experiencing that was very, very powerful, it had not happened to me to be there in a completely different place from the one I have lived in music at concerts or festivals. There it is the opposite, always protecting me, afraid that someone would do something to me, afraid of what might happen to me, of losing control. The volume prevents you from speaking, what you do is listen to yourself. You lose track of time and come out of there as having done a health exercise despite being in an environment that may seem to be the opposite.
This rave sound is the one found in _BCN747
M: It's on a lot of the record because we use the drum machines that are used for techno, I think every bit of the record is done with the 909 which is the drum machine that lays the foundation for techno. All that feeling of the river that we have when listening to a techno session we tried to make it on our album, since they are pop songs and we were looking for coherence. Techno is also in that there are very few elements on the record: The bit, the musical instrument and the voice, with three elements the music for the record is generated instead of recording many layers. It's a techno take on a pop song. We really like the minimal in techno, and we have tried to bring it to the record.
You do direct very free
M: We don't use laptops live, just machines that force you to build the music from scratch on stage instead of having the safety net of the laptop, which is sometimes sequence tracks. Since there is nothing, there are no pre-recorded ones, you have to build it. We think it's nice to do it in this primitive way, very much from 2000 or 1995, that time when that magic happened with that electronics that they called IDM. Those magical directs that when the laptops arrived normalized everything a little more and took it to a safer place. We do it a bit on the edge of the precipice, we like it that way.
Inside the album, _Annikillación is different from the rest, with a very powerful message
Z: We had the feeling that it was a hit, it has all the fury of Juno concentrated in one song. It was fun to do it with the anger of observing the reality of our music industry, how sometimes you separate yourself from others and you think you are in a privileged position where you can observe it as if you were not part of it. Thanks to that distance we dared to make this song, to look at the rest of the industry as if we didn't belong to it and see how they cheat, see how everyone wants to be a copy of what already works. But while we were making the song we realized that we too are completely inside that wheel that we criticize, and that we are part of the problem. It was a shock, recounted here in summary it seems very obvious, but at the moment we did it, there really was a moment of superiority, but superiority to slap us with the wrong hand.
The difference between narcissism and humility
M: Some time ago, when a countercultural act such as hip hop or techno was created, the system took a long time to engulf it and include it in the mainstream. Now the photocopy of the countercultural act comes out very quickly. It seems that it is completely impossible to fight against this ultra-capitalist predator
Z: It made us angry that every time something genuine appears it is cloned almost in real time. But at the same time, our first song on the album, _BCN747, tries to be a copy of Low, a band that we admire and that we copy without any shame. Every time we criticize something, the weight of the criticism ends up falling on us, as if we were unable to save ourselves from it. Especially in this song it was very funny to be so foul-mouthed and think, how cool, how cute we were on the previous album, how cute everything is, and here we take them for pretty asses (laughs). We walk out of the room and we see the world and we are not immune to it, we are affected by it and we embody it.
Another subject in which you are especially critical is Los Feliz
M It was very heavy to see the contrast in Los Angeles, I had never been in a city where you can only drive and when you see it illuminated by that light that has given rise to so many Hollywood movies, it leaves you surprised.
Z: I really wanted to see Los Angeles and we got there at noon with that light that made us fall in love deeply, but as soon as the sun went down that became the passage of terror, just like that. We wanted to talk about beauty, all the time we wanted to tell what we felt with the bikes in Santa Monica, as if we were Lana del Rey, burning our faces. But what came out to us was the other, and instead of holding it back we said let's talk about that and we're going to talk precisely about this neighborhood of Los Feliz, full of wealthy people and two blocks from the fentanyl crisis. How do you see that, how are you seeing the Hollywood stars that have sold you so much and that you want to see so much, but when you are there you are only thinking that they are going to rob me, they are going to shoot me, it is getting dark, they have all closed the shops, where I am, what a dirty place. It had a huge impact on us because later our favorite photos, of all the trips, are the ones from Los Angeles, they are the most beautiful because they have the most incredible light all the time, and I fall in love again when I see the photos.
You are from the self-production club, from the do it yourself
Z: I would love to have my vinyl factory, but it is very expensive.
M: Being able to own the whole process of making a record we saw as a path to real independence. We didn't get to having a vinyl factory, but everything that has to do with creativity did.
Z: The mix is also a way of expressing yourself, in fact we asked our masterizer to advise us on whether we were making the mix at least worthy, and what he told us was that it was a very exciting mix, and that's what he said. it was worth us For us now mixing is almost part of composition in _Juno. While the ideas are coming out, while that scream is in _Anikillación, we are already imagining that reverb that makes those high-pitched voices fit inside the chord wheel, that has that effect that is part of the song. Learning to handle it has been a lot of fun, we've also eaten our heads a lot, Martí is a student of mixes, he's doing things all day.
Do you enjoy the whole process?
Z: We like it, we love what we do and it is the only way to at least be happy, since we are not going to earn money, and everything is more and more difficult, not to bow down to anything other than our desires and our taste and Our criteria is very tasty. We finished the album happy, learning a lot and happy with the result.
