Guzmán Robador | Alicante (EFE).- The musicians Zahara and Martí Perarnau, members of the duo _juno, begin this Tuesday at the Auditorium of the University of Alicante a tour of several cities in the country to present their second work, “BCN747”, an album fruit of his effort to cement a “true creative independence” and achieve “handling the job of making a record from the moment you record the first chord until you deliver it.”
María Zahara Gordillo, better known as Zahara (Úbeda, Jaén, 1983), and Martí Perarnau (Manresa, Barcelona, 1985) combine their respective separate musical careers with the project _juno (it is written with an underscore in front to differentiate themselves from other bands with identical name and all in lowercase), which began its journey in April 2019 and in which both write and produce all the songs “hand in hand, 50%”.
A playground to experience
“Since this group was born, we decided that it would be a playground and that we could experiment even more free from pressure of all kinds,” said Zahara, whose solo artistic career highlights, among other works, her album “Puta” (2021 ).
In an interview with EFE, both artists have revealed that the documentary “Get Back”, by Peter Jackson, about The Beatles sessions for the making of the album “Let It Be”, where you can see how Paul McCartney and John Lennon exchange Shameless ideas to create the famous song that gives title to this audiovisual production with archive images, changed the way they compose.
The result of “that magical moment” between McCartney and Lennon has been, in the case of _juno, “doing everything with four hands and two brains”: his latest album is written, performed, recorded, produced and, for the first time, mixed for the duo “We have discovered that mixing is also a way of artistic expression”, Zahara has confessed.
And not only “Get back” has influenced them when it comes to composing. Also advanced and experimental dance music, live techno and classic pop.
The tour
With the concert that they will offer this Tuesday at the Auditorium of the University of Alicante to present “BCN747” begins their LIMBO Tour, which will tour Zaragoza (March 4), Madrid, on the occasion of the International Festival of Sacred Art (March 18). , Granada (April 14), Seville (April 15), Barcelona, within the framework of the Mi.lenni Festival (April 21), As Pontes, in A Coruña (April 29), Bilbao -Ciclo Punto ZERO- ( June 1), Inca, in Mallorca (June 10), and Cangas del Narcea, in Asturias, at Prestoso Fest, which is held from August 3 to 5.
Zahara and Martí leave room 626 where they wrote the compositions for their first album, “BCN626”, released in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, to tell the stories of their travels around the world (Mexico, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam…) with his second album, which was released on the 17th.
There are ten songs composed between hotels and airports in which “the intention” to reveal “the beauty that we observe” clashes with “the reality that we perceive, how cities are increasingly soulless and how we feel part of a system that we hate, but , precisely, to be able to travel the world, we are part of it and we benefit from it. We ended up talking about that contradiction”, explained Zahara.
Luminous music and darker lyrics
“The album is, musically, quite bright (…). The songs can be danced to and it is not a pessimistic album”, according to Martí, who, however, acknowledges that “the lyrics can have a darker and more somber look due to that vomit of capitalism that we have been finding in the big cities that we have visited, especially in the United States”.
Martí maintains that they have “always” been “a lot pigeonholed in that world that they have called ‘indie’”, but they have “discovered that a lot of music that is included in that label really has little to do with being independent”.
“We do not feel very identified with that label” and “the way we have found to find that independent bastion of self-management (…) has been to produce ourselves, be our own engineers, record everything and mix our records,” he stressed.
For her part, Zahara has stressed that they need to “make music” to “talk about those things” that “disquiet” them and has stated that pop is a kind of “Trojan horse”, a vehicle to introduce a message.
“At this time when capitalism and dictatorial behaviors that extol the darkest pasts of civilizations seem to be gaining strength again, our hearts ask us to say something, but we don’t think about it, it comes naturally to us,” Martí has summarized. EFE
