FIRST PERSON

Fifteen years ago iCat was born, the first “Polonia” was broadcast on TV3, the debuts of Els Amics de les Arts and Manel were still two and three years away, Rocío Jurado died and Joan Miquel Oliver released his first solo album, Surfistas en cámara lenta. It might have seemed like a small diversion on the part of the musician from Sóller, since at that time his band, Antònia Font, was going through a particularly sweet moment after the successes achieved with Alegría (2002) and Taxi (2004). In fact, if a few years before Surfistas…, Joan Miquel had already hidden under the name of Droguería Esperanza in the sound poem Odisea treinta mil, why shouldn’t we think that now he was simply surfing to play?

What happened afterwards -the years and the albums-, certifies Surfistas en cámara lenta as the beginning of a solid personal career, combined with the militancy in Antònia Font until the dissolution of the group, and that until 2020 adds up to five more albums, not to mention his literary adventures in the fields of narrative or theatre. If Oliver’s songs by Antònia Font had already marked a remarkable turning point in the chronicle of music in Catalan at the beginning of the century, now the author felt the need to assert himself in the first person with a collection of eleven songs where the frozen pixels suggested by the title of the album alternate with disturbing images (La mujer que mordió un piano) and the most elegant melancholy (Pallasso).

A songbook that offered and offers us privileged views of the rear-view mirror of the great Emerson Fitipaldi, jumping from the instrumental Martian bonfire of Soy un lo-fi to a Picnic as ephemeral as it is happy. All this, driven by the Clock that opens the album, which perhaps also helps us to understand the artist’s reasons for embarking on this new path: “clock calculator you’re already 30 years old / … / Clock you’ve got your life ahead of you / clock you can’t stop”.