Arnau Tordera (Obeses): "We are losing territory we don't know exactly for what"

BarcelonaA large part of Arnau Tordera's (Tona, 1986) musical interests are present in I have it in my heart (Global Music, 2024-2026), an album by the group Obeses released in two parts. Now comes the second part: Diastole. Eight songs that mix rock, metal, musical, pop, the sound of a quartans' band and a version of the Virolai with the Coral Canigó. Of the album, but also of the position of resistance in the Catalan musical ecosystem, of various political and economic upheavals, of the Obeses festival and of the program The Renaissance, speaks the leader of the group completed by Arnau Burdó (keyboards), Maiol Montané (drums) and the poet Jaume Coll Mariné (below), winner of the Carles Riba prize 2025 with the poetry collection Like leaves (Proa).

You had the second part of the album quite sewn up when you released the other one?

— There were elements that yes, and others that were to be part of the second part that I discarded. I had a more or less clear and defined horizon, but it has changed.

Why?

— Because there has been a whole period of time between one part of the work and the other, and this has led me to look for other themes to explore and to delve into styles that perhaps initially I wasn't so clear would go where they have gone. And also because of what we received from the first part of the album from the public. This, whether you like it or not, also stimulates you. It's not that it hypothecates what you have to generate in the future, but in some way you are receptive to what is commented. This second part resembles what I projected at the moment of completing the first, even though it's not the same as the idea I had then, because a creative process also leads you down unexpected paths.

Was the path that led you to a metal song like Dust in the Era so unexpected?Pols a l’era?

— I don't think so. Those who know Obeses from the beginning I think they were satisfied with the piece, but it didn't surprise them as much as perhaps a more general audience who associates Obeses with the song Regala petons. For people who don't know the project, yes, naturally, I can understand that it's quite shocking. But, I insist, it is a piece that expresses itself 100% with the singularities that Obeses has been experimenting with throughout its career and in no case does it move away towards a territory that is not its own. Perhaps it explores it in a more intense way, with more extreme resources, but, nevertheless, it is part of the same language of music that we have been making since the beginning sixteen years ago.

I have the feeling that Dust to the era is a song in which there is little patience. You start with a very specific color, which is almost death metal, and you immediately change it and change it again, as if you were paying a small tribute to different metal styles.

— It could be. For a matter of vocal training and expressive need when returning to a certain more or less tonal harmony, the most abrupt and intense brushstrokes are not absolute, but rather a color that appears throughout the unfolding of the piece. In any case, it seems to me to be a coherent piece, even though different registers of brass and different ways of singing are deployed. According to the way I conceive music, perhaps a piece that was extreme in its entirety would not have satisfied me either.

In your work, the musical treatment aligns very well with what you want to explain, whether for ironic contrast or simply because you believe that music should accompany what you want to express with the lyrics. This forcefulness was essential to convey the indignation you express in Dust in the era?

— I think so. We precisely reach this forcefulness due to the message the piece contains as we witness this world that expels farming, which agonizes before a death that more or less seems inevitable. This intensity is precisely linked to the loss of a shared history that has also defined a good part of our country's landscape since time immemorial, with trades that are also indisputably linked to society and that at the same time remain essential to continue living if we do not want to depend on other producing countries. It is a cry that I thought needed to be expressed with this forcefulness. It would not seem coherent to me with the way I understand music to speak about this topic with other aesthetic registers. And vice versa, it would not seem coherent to me either to speak about other topics that I address here with this aesthetic register.

You don't make programmatic music as such, but there is a lot of coherence between the musical aesthetic and the theme.

— I would say that, perhaps in what can be conceived as programmatic music in the field of contemporary popular recorded music consumption, it would be the thing that could resemble it the most. Music places you in a context where there is semantics and you can perceive it regardless of what the lyrics say. Sometimes they say different things, but precisely in this permanent dialogue there is a deeper reading.

In this same song there is a criticism of the overexploitation carried out by some agri-food industries.

— Yes, yes, naturally. This piece captures the cry of anger from the peasant revolt, but also the degradation of agricultural land, which in large part is also the responsibility of the disproportionate super-farms that feed half the world and are in no way sustainable for the good of the country. There is an Osona association called Per una Plana Viva which rightly fights for this issue. And following a act of protest they held, to which I was invited, I became more aware of this circumstance.

Do you still live in Baix Llobregat?

— Yes, I am an osonenc who has emigrated.

Has the reality of Baix Llobregat opened other perspectives for you?

— Yes. I live in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, which is a town swallowed by a gigantic industrial estate where Seat, Mercadona, Lidl... are located. Hectares and hectares of vineyards that degrade month after month while new industrial estates appear. It seems like a monster of capitalist ambition that has no end. As an Osonenc, I was already a witness to this, but I lived in Tona, which at that time was a town that did not yet have this reality so latent and so close. But in Sant Esteve Sesrovires I have perceived it clearly. We are losing the territory, and we don't really know in favor of what, because in the end, what does this excessive ambition bring? The degradation of our patrimonial treasures of the land? I don't know, I don't see any sense in it.

It's not the first time you've put a political horn in songs, but it's evident that you've never made a song like Capitalist circus.

— I suppose there also comes a moment in an artist's creative life when you tackle certain themes that you previously left aside, sometimes out of fear of not knowing how to handle them sufficiently. In any case, with the world collapsing on all sides, it seemed opportune to me to write this satire ridiculing our own existence as we have organized it. Various characters appear in it in a rather stimulating play of images. At the same time, the expressive possibility of sarcasm has always stimulated me, and when I had the idea of moving forward with a piece like this, I was clear that it had to be about exalting this parodic dimension of the circus but absolutely symbolic.

Musically, you're a collision between La Trinca and Andrew Lloyd Webber, to put it simply.

— Yes, it has diverse influences. From the American musical, in terms of instrumentation and some resources. And La Trinca is a group that understood precisely what you were saying before about the possibility of programmatic music in modern music. They had great arrangers to generate these spaces of musical understanding that would place the listener in a familiar context. Obviously, this works when the listener speaks the same musical language as the author and understands that the author wants to place them in a specific context. La Trinca did this a lot. For me, they were masters in this regard. Yes, we take advantage of the circus context to elaborate this, circus music, fun, despite the tragedy being narrated.

Towards the end of the song, you talk about politicians, who "pretend to be the voice of the people but are not". Don't you think anti-politics is dangerous because it can be precisely the gateway for the far-right or populism?

— Yes, I would say it can be. Indeed, we see that it is, but, nevertheless, we have seen that, in the evolution of contemporary Western societies led by professional politicians trained in the political management career, politicians have not been capable of leading societies or human collectives towards a more positive place than seemed perhaps fifty years ago. Social realities are complicated, and I don't think there is an explicit, concrete, or specific solution beyond the assumption of individual responsibilities that reverberate in the collective. In this sense, seeing the world as it is, falling into the same errors it has fallen into before, obviously politicians have responsibility, but equally each of us has a share of responsibility that we are surely not assuming. That's why we are where we are, I think.

Let's go back to the programmatic obsession for a moment: A thimbleful, a song you sing a cappella.

— A thimble stylistically refers to the barbershop, a polyphonic style that was born in American barbershops where people would meet and sing. It was a style I had wanted to explore for a long time, but it requires learning coral technique. I allowed myself the necessary time to learn it. And it was very good because, just after publishing it, two groups wrote to me about barbershop from around here, The Humphrey's Quartet and Metropolitan Union, who asked me for the score because I had captivated them.

It is a triumph when two barbershop ensembles ask you for the sheet music.

— I didn't expect it at all. It was a surprise.

And from triumph to failure. In the song Elogi del fracàs, there is a moment when the character singing says: "I have made mistakes so many times". What are the most notable mistakes you have made?

— I collect existential possibilities and I found it stimulating to make a piece of this type that would vindicate failure as part of life, as an even more necessary part for possible success than success itself. Success is momentary, instantaneous, it is a moment of light in the middle of a path that generally has no lights. My failures as an artist are many, but they are compensated by a stubbornness, a will, and a self-awareness that the path is indeed important and necessary to travel despite the difficulties. Obeses has never been a group that has projected itself into an extraordinary media dimension, nor has it been helped in this sense, but we are still here and this is also a vindication. The path of Obeses is very long. In this country we are not very accustomed to seeing musicians with long careers. There are musicians who celebrate forty years, but who quit halfway and who have not explained anything more interesting after returning. The merit of a project like ours is to accumulate experience, accumulate years and failures, of course, but to still be able to make the best album of our career at every moment. To this day, this is what has been achieved, also learning from the disappointments and the most difficult moments.

Have you ever thought about the artist's unease when they realize that from the middle of their career onwards they are not doing anything important?

— It is not a concern for me because, in general, I have never felt connected to these types of careers. My teacher is Albert Guinovart, who is a musician by career and trajectory, and every piece he generates in his creative maturity is extraordinary and is a new masterpiece, just like Verdi in his time, for example. They are artists who have been able to continue saying things as the years went by; and the success of their proposal has not been simply an effervescent matter that connected spontaneously with a certain audience, especially in youth. Obeses also has this journey and now, sixteen years after starting the project, I believe it is evident that it is a career of trajectory that is being built more slowly than many others or the immense majority, but with much more firmness.

In another song, The tune of the wheat, you make the sound of cobla more delicate, of a cobla of three quartans.

— Yes. In fact, the cobla of eleven musicians that we know today, which Pep Ventura more or less established, comes from this formation of the cobla de tres quartans: flabiol and tamborí, tarota and sac de gemecs, and sometimes also trombone. It was the musical formation that was responsible for bringing music to villages for celebrations in past times and centuries. This evolved and ended up being the cobla we know today. I wanted to make a sonic reference to this germinal cobla de tres quartans with instruments for which I hadn't written. For flabiol and tamborí, yes, but for sac de gemecs and tarota, no. Well, for tarota I had done something specific for a project called Filomena. In any case, I wanted to play with the idea of a work song. Nowadays people don't sing because the music already plays without having to be materialized, but during the immense majority of history people sang. And I liked to link it with this tradition of the country, which is the cultivation of wheat, and imagine what a song linked to wheat could be like and could be used when we thresh, when we winnow, when we reap. Therefore, in this meeting between the traditional world and certain electronic resources, the piece is inspired by this new way of explaining tradition and by tradition itself.

Are you connecting too, with this meeting?

— Yes. It is quite fashionable and quite successful. It is one of the ways to maintain tradition; it is not the only one, because sometimes it is also good to go directly to tradition and not mix it.

You were talking about the function of music. Where it is most poetically evident is in Fort in death. The song makes its way until a moment arrives when you say: "The day I leave, sing the song for me". You place music as that which preserves our legacy in the memory of others.

— Correct. Music has been since time immemorial a repository of knowledge transmitted orally, until we reached the 20th century, recording was invented and it destroyed the existence of musicians because, imagine the paradigm shift it entailed at all levels... Before, music was always re-expressed. I like to invoke music itself and to challenge the listener to be part of this communicative chain which is the possibility that someone else can interpret the piece at a given moment and make it their own. Fort in death addresses a fascinating theme: death. But I wanted to explore the possibility of approaching it from another perspective: death in solitude can also be a good death in the face of a life lived in fullness. Therefore, it vindicates life, because in the end death is inevitable, it is absolutely democratic and there is no way to dodge it. Faced with this certainty, the piece proposes a vital fullness.

Joan Pau Cumellas' harmonica places the song in a mythical territory, like a twilight western, but it is not a sad song, nor an elegy.

— The echo of the harmonica already places you in a kind of lament, but it is not a lament of tragedy, but a song of life, which has difficult moments but can be lived fully.

Has your stance of not participating in certain dynamics of the live music sector, such as certain festivals, been self-sabotage or are you convinced that you have done what was necessary?

— Seen in perspective, I am completely satisfied with the Obeses option. It is a much more complex path than others, but here we are, sixteen years after starting and at one of the band's best moments. With drive, with happiness, with the certainty of having completed this album that has cost us so much, of having completed it as we wanted and free from ties that limit expressive and creative capacity. Therefore, with an autonomy that at certain times has been a hindrance, because when you do not subordinate yourself to the laws of the music industry, and not only do you not subordinate yourself to them, but you publicly denounce them, your life becomes complicated from a professional point of view. Here there is a struggle, a way of understanding the world, the country and Catalan music and its richness, and therefore there is an explicit confrontation. Our bet is this, and we defend it.

Can you explain to me what the Festa Major of Obeses is? On August 1st you will have your third edition.

— Yes, precisely following the release of the first part of the album, we had no places to present it because it was extremely difficult to move forward with a musical project that wasn't determined by the canon and didn't subordinate itself to business logic. It was very difficult to find concerts, so we decided to organize one in a self-managed way with people from Roda de Ter who run a cultural project and a creation space. And we did that first edition, which was a success. We coordinated it with over 500 people who paid for a ticket and came. Last year we repeated it and now we have decided that it will be an annual Obeses event to reclaim the project and the way of doing things, with this desire to be independent of third-party wills. Our followers have celebrated it as a moment of collective reunion, where a very satisfactory, very pleasant atmosphere is breathed, which rightly claims not only the music of this band, but also their way of facing the difficulties they have in this country.

By the way, how do you feel about the program La renaixença, from 3Cat?

— Satisfied with the work we do and frankly comfortable in that context. It is a fantastic team, in a different register than many people did not know about me, actively working for the music of the country. Naturally, it is a humor program, but we try to bring a certain knowledge, a certain critical contrast.