"Music is the only thing I found to take away the pain inside."

Xavi Forné began designing concert posters for the bands he played in when he was still a teenager. Twenty years later, those flyers The black and white sketches that were passed from hand to hand have become international tour posters for bands like Metallica, Depeche Mode, the Black Keys, Soundgarden, and Foo Fighters, and are seen all over the world.

The day we meet in a bar in Poblenou, he explains that the sketches he'd been commissioned to do for Guns'n'Roses' latest European tour haven't quite come out. That happens sometimes. "At first, when a foreign band I liked came here, I'd call the promoters and offer to do the poster in exchange for a couple of tickets to the concert, and quite a bit. It took me a long time to believe that what I was doing had value. But now I've even had to learn to say no, because I can't take on all the...

He created his own studio, Error!Design, and a parallel record label; He had a studio-gallery in the Gràcia neighborhood where he played live with people like Cala Vento and Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and which he had to close due to the "exorbitant" rise in rent; he promoted a collective digital project (The Poster Collective) to highlight the work of different designers, and in 2022 published a first book about his work: 20 years of music artwork. It doesn't stop.

The day we meet, he's carrying a couple of cameras in his backpack to go record a friend's concert. "Now you could say I have a recognizable design style. It may seem dark, occult, but at the same time, it's romantic. This is what they always ask me for, because it's what they know about me, but I want to do new things, move beyond the collage of old prints, do more illustration, video, animation, and open up to other fields." What's clear to him is that design and music can't be completely separated from ideology and social commitment. Today he's wearing a self-designed T-shirt with the slogan "Antifascist Church Burner": "I can design for a band that isn't exactly my musical style, but there must be a minimum connection in terms of attitude."

In addition to all the roles he's played in the world of design, he also plays a musician. The list of bands in which he's participated as a guitarist is long, from Amunike Lehendakari to more recent ones like Syberia and Malämmar. However, his most personal project has been Ulmus, which was born in 2013 during a very complicated period in his life that happened again a couple of years ago: "I suffered a very strong crisis of agoraphobia that prevented me from leaving the house. I was incapable. I picked up the guitar and made those songs that a few years later, incredibly, I was playing at a festival in Galicia.

Thanks to music and psychological support, she has been able to overcome these two episodes of anguish, the second most recent, during 2023. "No matter how much you get out, you can always fall back. At first I tried everything: acupuncture, Bach flowers, homeopathy... and it didn't work, until it didn't work at all, until it didn't work at all, until it didn't work at all, until it didn't work at all. What you need is not a pill, what you need is confidence. And this is what I find in music; seeing that I am capable of creating beautiful things is my self-help.

To imagine what Ulmus sounds like, the first thing to do is to move away from the idea of commercial music that everyone has in their head: "It's hypnotic, mantric... There are people who tell me they put it on to study or to work. I even have a friend who works with people who are in a terminal state and, when she knows that someone has only a few hours left to live, she plays Ulmus."