Amaral: "We had a visceral hatred of becoming 'celebrities'"

BarcelonaDolce Vita (Sony, 2024) is the new album by Amaral, the musical project that Eva Amaral (Zaragoza, 1972) and Juan Aguirre (San Sebastián, 1965) have shared since 1993. They attend the ARA in a room at the Barceló Sants Hotel in Barcelona San Jorge Club on June 13th, as part of the Guitar BCN programme. Among other things, they talk about anonymity, the family experience in the post-war period, groups like El Último de la Fila and Fugazi, infernal songs and the Nick Cave concert that changed their lives. "There was a disarray inside us that would never end if we didn't make music," Aguirre recalls.

As is usual in their albums, in Dolce Vita very diverse influences are also evident.

— Eva Amaral: Our goal was to try to go down paths we hadn't gone down before. The thing is that often our personality when making songs or as instrumentalists has a lot to do with it. However, there has been an evolution in some rhythmic patterns and structures that break the logic of verse, chorus, verse, chorus and have fun. Juan's phrase during the recording of the album was: "We've never done this before."

For example, the introduction of Book.

— EA: Yes, it is one of the discoveries we made in the studio, from sounds captured in the middle of the mountain that we filtered to build this intro mysterious.

And in Icebreaker dub sneaks in little by little.

— Juan Aguirre: We have always been big fans of Lee Scratch Perry, but it's the first time we've filtered it through our melodies. The riff The main piece is also a somewhat unusual structure for us. The thing is that as you follow the lyrics you don't notice it, but if you were to listen to it without the lyrics, you would notice that there is an interesting point of instability in the harmonic sequence. Another thing that we had never tried is the type of pianoHere you are, which has a bit of an EDM influence, so to speak.

Something more ambient or fluffy.

— ALREADY: Yes. We have some obsessions that have always been there. For example, getting energy, an energy that can come from all the classic records that we like, even more from punk than from orthodox rock. The energy of groups like Fugazi, which people can consider to be very far from what we are supposed to be. And linked to this belief in energy is the obsession of making it coexist with that atmosphere that comes from music that has marked us and that is not pop. Of course, then there is the super-song spirit, because we adore the song format.

In Here you are sings: "Indestructible between Joan of Arc and Karl Marx" Who were you thinking of?

— ALREADY: It is a song of love and admiration.

— EA: In an open sense. I often sing it thinking of my friends.

There is heroin and historical materialism…

— EA: Leading the people [laughs].

— ALREADY: Yes, what happens is that the heroine also has a fragile point and almost a mystical madness. And Marx is not only dialectical materialism: he also has a point of almost mystical illumination. And the balance between the two is very interesting because I think there are people in the streets of our cities who pursue their daily lives with a point of illumination. What happens is that they are not well-known people, nor will they publish any manifesto, nor will they die at the stake, fortunately...

— EA: Well, sometimes they set you on fire on the networks.

He has a song, It could have been me, dedicated to the Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, who was murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship. Have you ever thought about the real power of songs or about the price you pay when you take a political position?

— EA: Music doesn't change the world, and songs aren't the way to do that. A song can put you in a mood that makes you take a stand for something, but it's people and their everyday actions that can change things.

And is there any cost to political positioning?

— ALREADY: I don't think so. We make songs, and people perceive us as a group that makes songs.

— EA: We are more than just for something. However, it happens now that when you take a stand for something there will be a social backlash. It is hard to face the avalanche of opinions, which are often more than opinions, and that is sad.

He also has songs against something. I'm thinking about In the center of a tornado, in which most of the situations that are explained are of violence. And the positioning, evidently, is against this violence.

— EA: In the center of a tornado It tries to express the helplessness you feel in the face of human cruelty or the cruelty of existence itself, which is the other side of the sweetness of living. Despite being a choral song, with different characters, there is a fragment in which I tell a small part of my father's story, which is something I have wanted to capture for a long time because he belongs to a generation that lived in extremely difficult times in which the objective was to survive. My father was born in 1929 in Extremadura. They were an extremely poor family. My great-grandfather was a cheapskate in Portugal, and he moved to Extremadura, in Cáceres, because he was struck by lightning while carrying the cheapskate in the mountains. There were a lot of brothers, and in the post-war period they were very hungry. So, when my father was 14, he falsified his identification to enter the army, which you couldn't go in if you weren't 16. He did it so he could eat, to get a mouth off the table where all his brothers ate. He had no military vocation at all. He explained to me that when he was 14 or 15 years old, they sent him to the mountains with a rifle and told him: "There are maquis here and they are the devil." He was a child with a rifle, and he was hiding because he didn't intend to shoot any maquis. This image has always had a great impact on me; I imagined him as a little bird hiding in the middle of the mountain.

What is your best memory related to music? And what memory would you like to forget?

— ALREADY: The best memory, not to mention our music, is when we saw Nick Cave at the Teatro Principal in Zaragoza.

— EA: Yes, that's also the first thing I thought of because it was glorious.

— ALREADY: It was amazing. We had seen quite a few amazing concerts, because in Zaragoza, when I was very young, I remember going to the Creation Festival, where Alan McGee played with his group [Biff Bang Pow!, a big influence on Juan Aguirre's first group, Días de Vino y Rosas] and other bands on the Creation label. It was like a kind of giant, very noisy symphony. I didn't understand anything, I didn't know how it was done, but it was a revelation. And then, when we were a bit older, we went to the area around the Teatro Principal. We didn't have a penny, but we saw a man who looked like a foreigner who was part of Nick Cave's team and we said to him: "Look, we don't have any money, but we would like to see the concert." And he gave us two tickets! There is no space in the diary to describe what we heard at that concert. It is one of the memories with the most brutal impact I have.

What year was it?

— EA: It must have been 1994.

— ALREADY: The era of the record Let love in. The concert began with Do you love me? We had only heard a few songs on Ràdio 3 and yet we knew it was the place to be, but we couldn't afford the tickets because it was a very precarious time in our lives.

— EA: I think a lot of people went to the concert like that and ended up being Nick Cave devotees.

— ALREADY: We both left the concert with the feeling that there was a disarray inside us that would never end if we didn't make music.

And the memory that I would like to forget?

— EA: A difficult moment was when Juan had a hand injury. We had been playing a very intense period of concerts and I suppose the stress caused him to have a very bad tendonitis.

— ALREADY: This was already in the 2000s, when we suddenly lost our anonymity with an album that changed our lives on every level. We went from playing in clubs to playing on giant stages. I played the guitar with so much force with my fingers that I finally broke it. After five or six months we were able to go back to the studio and record the album. Birds in the head.

In the song Until the music ends talk about "hellish songs that have stayed in their hearts." Like which ones?

— ALREADY: Do you love me? It's a song from hell. There's the sound of tubular bells, the wild percussion, the sound of the bare bass without guitars. Suddenly the guitar comes in, plays a chord and stays for thirty-two bars without sounding. The hearts that come in, the tribal percussion...

— EA: The disc Psychocandy, from The Jesus and Mary Chain, too.

— ALREADY: There are also hellish songs from the more melodic Italian tradition, which are super exciting. And the bridge of Space oddity David Bowie's work is absolutely hellish, because it's something so complex and at the same time so beautiful. I think Rick Wakeman did it.

— EA: Anyway, when I wrote this verse about the infernal songs I was thinking about the songs that are sometimes played in bars and that you dance to even if you don't like them.

You were talking earlier about what it meant to lose your anonymity in such a brutal way. I don't know if over the years, and given that the new generations are interested in other things, you are regaining a bit of your anonymity?

— EA: Well, partly yes and partly no. There is a whole generation that listened to our music in the car because their parents played it for them. And it is very curious to see this feedback That comes to us from the "car children", as I call them. Look, we have always lived very peacefully. That is to say, we lost our anonymity, but in reality we have never stopped doing everything we wanted to do. Our life has continued to be what it was, or we have convinced ourselves of this.

— ALREADY: We had a visceral hatred of becoming celebrities, and we always wanted the music to precede us. Seen from a distance, I think Manolo García and Quimi Portet were a model for us. With El Último de la Fila they built a way of having impressive songs that flew much further than them. They and REM were our references.