http://www.lavanguardia.com/magazine/20 ... azine.html
Here is made a traduction via the Google traduct
On 15 July officially unveil one of the great innovations of the season, which is none other than the new album from the Pet Shop Boys. Baptized Electric, shows musical paths by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe now leading one of the ships most representative popular sound culture. Barcelona is one of the privileged capital where you can see and hear the spectacular audiovisual duo capsule has prepared to present his new work on a global scale. It will be under the Sonar festival (among other things) electronic music and multimedia art world reference, where the British offered a preview his new book on Saturday June 15.
With the emergence of his new album, the prolific British band, will be his third album of original material and unprecedented in the last decade, in addition to numerous side projects and touring almost without respite, can not hide a contagious enthusiasm, which want engage the journalist when he received a dispatch from its new management company in London. Relaxed, ironic. Explanatory and expansive Neil Tennant, monosyllabic and a point spread Chris Lowe, transmit in any case a maturity and a desire for a job well done that contrasts with the often irreverent festive is your music.
The sun is shining, the street where the office is located a pleasant quiet breathing. The English are effusive baroquisms offering free coffee or a glass of water, and there are both dressed discreetly anonymous civilians.
They have over thirty years dedicated to art, music and fireworks dance intelligent, and still having the time.
Electric? Putting a Pet Shop Boys album is not a redundancy? If an electric sound in pop, possibly be his. The news would be that I had a new album titled Acoustic.
Neil Tennant: A title with which we wanted to somehow differentiate the content in relation to our previous album, Elysium, a work that was more reflective, more contained, even more slowly.
The way the fans consume music now, does it still make sense to do traditional concept albums, works as a whole and a unity between its parts?
Chris Lowe: For me personally, no doubt. You can buy individual songs on iTunes, of course, but in some works is critical to listen to the pieces connected to each other. It's like when buy a book on Amazon you could ask only one chapter and then another. It would be absolutely absurd, right?
NT: With the little time we have the people, might be a good idea ... But I think it has a full sense, still has reason to be the album as a concept, as a whole, if you're interested in the universe that creates the artist, his particular microcosm, if you want to know the pitch is treading in order to create those songs or songs you like. We are telling Electric because different starting point, vital tone, not so much when composing as record and produce it, very different from our previous album. And that feeling runs through the whole album.
Speaking of the disk, have included a version of a song by Bruce Springsteen, The Last to Die.
NT: I should explain a little the overall process of the album. These compositions were out of Elysium were those with a more dance, and in that context mis-matched. After the recover and begin to work them with producer Stuart Price, in his service are Madonna, New Order, The Killers, Kylie Minogue, Seal-but the issue started to become more complex and took on an unexpected dimension. Was then added recently written songs, and left an entire disk of the Pet Shop Boys dance clearly focus. In short, an album of songs with a more experimental sound and dance ... and with a version of Springsteen. Not so strange.
Do not see it shocking?
NT: We suggested a while Stevie Wonder. We hear, has a guitar riff that was well to our sound, and we have included. Looks good on the disk.
Are you fans of Springsteen's music?
N.T.: The truth is, very little. While not bad, it's nice.
C. L.: To me personally I really like. And music, which is something I like Streets of Philadelphia. But he is very cool. I saw them perform sometime in the eighties, in London, at the time of Elvis Costello.
N.T.: It seems an eternity.
Another issue in Electric has a title very Pet Shop Boys and reflects some of the group's philosophy: Love is a Bourgeois Contract (love is a contract bourgeois).
NT: Well, is inspired by a novel that appeared in the late eighties written by David Lodge, a writer who I love and who wrote a series of three novels that clearly reflects some aspects still very Victorian society current British.
A politically charged undoubted title.
NT: What characterizes Lodge, plus the quality of their writing and thematic breadth is its profound and fine sense of humor, with which satirizes about academics, all its pomp, artificial employment of language. It offers a view of reality that surrounds him very interesting, coming from someone of Catholic formation and knows those social segments of speaking quite accurately. But we've put that title to a song does not mean that I commune with its meaning.
CL: Moving on, there is one aspect in this record that may not seem so, but for us it was very interesting. We worked, we composed and wrote in London and we sent the result to our producer at his studio in Los Angeles. He worked with it and resent us with additions or changes. And here we sumábamos the vocals. By the time difference was like being active for almost 24 hours, and the feeling was very positive because we saw that the work went ahead smoothly, quickly and efficiently.
Very efficient, yes, but the technology is perhaps relocating, changing, eroding what was the teamwork, the very essence of what the work of a group.
CL: When force majeure work with someone who is on another continent, the advantages that gives you high-tech are indisputable. But what has been, is, the compositional work, creative, both Neil and I, we live in the same city, London. And honestly confess that there is nothing that exceeds in the process of creating both be together in the same physical space, watching, discussing, commenting. In the same room. And looking at it in perspective, I see the way we work has changed little over the years.
NT: I think even intensified this proximity to the time of writing. And it is precisely because of technology, because now there are many stages of the process of creating and finishing a work that we can do ourselves without having to rely on others or move to another site.
CL: At the beginning of work with all that we offer technological developments in the late nineties, we needed enough people around because we were not very good with programming and others. Now it is much simpler, we propose very clear ideas, basic and simple of music that interest us, and then share them to dress appropriately.
After many years of work, endless touring, apparently tiring of dedication and also sustained success, are you still motivated?
NT: Contact with the public is critical, and that's what explains why we devote so intensely and for so long touring. But it is also true that touring would stop automatically if we do not consider our music good. We are self-critical enough to realize when something is good, you may be interested level, or if not up to scratch. We have a very large catalog of songs that really like the fan, and could easily live dedicated to them, but that, again, is something that does not fit into the way we do. It is above all the new music we make, the sound course changes we decided, compose original songs, which gives reason to follow as the first day, with interest and enthusiasm. And I guess the fans who will direct our things could settle our repertoire, but we always want to offer something new, different and original as possible. That's why we place so much importance, we invest so much in our tours and shows.
CL: I do not know why people are surprised that we continue with this attitude and delivery. At the end of the day, we work at what we love. The process of our business has always been more or less the same and do not change it, because it fills and works: compose music and songs, recorded it and finally found people to the remix and pull them all the juice possible. And that is a task that we are bored and we continue to see as exciting: going to the studio, preparing demos, discuss, organize the tour ...
In fact, little has changed since they started.
N.T.: Essentially, anything. We started in this hobby, for the love of music. And we assure you pleasure, because we love to be in contact with people who feel the same.
CL: I think it helps a lot that the two continue to be a big music fans, consumers uncontrollable sounds, try to keep up, keep the antennae alert. And that's something that our fans see, notice, feel and value.
Besides this forthcoming Electric and corresponding tour has started in Latin America, has any project more perspective?
CL: I think the tour will take away a lot of time and energy. The former, with its pauses and other, lasted nearly four years.
NT: Well, in recent times we have also been preparing a piece for orchestra of 45 minutes divided into eight parts on the figure of Alan Turing, the British mathematician invented the computer as we understand it today. A very interesting figure, tormented, persecuted and accused of being homosexual, and never publicly rehabilitated. He ended up committing suicide. I think it is a part, we have divided into these eight parts corresponding to eight times in his life, that somehow pays tribute to homosexuals who suffered countless similar situations for the simple fact of being. It is a theme that will debut with orchestra and might end appearing in disc form.
(Interestingly, the Barcelona group Hidrogenesse published last year an album devoted entirely to Turing, A bit iffy. Recital for Alan Turing, unanimous compliments welcomed by critics, who featured him as one of the new releases of the season.)
Moving on, but not country. All local media speak of the rise of anti-European positions in English politics. Are troubling news?
CL: I get the feeling that they are postures and confrontations at home basically. The elections which has surfaced this increase supporters' votes to break with Europe are local. I hope that does not go away.
NT: Yeah, I guess that things would change state elections. But the interesting thing about this phenomenon is still deeply rooted attitudes reflected in part of the English people, a series of feelings one way or another are linked to the disappearance of the British Empire. I think there are some bags of nostalgia and some uncertainty in a changing world. Not only they look with pity south but now reappears conflict with Germany, in a context of crisis, as if it were with Britain. People have trouble understanding that we live for the good and bad in an interconnected world.
In addition, a possible British abandonment of the European Union could shake the territorial map of the islands.
NT: Of course, starting with the fact that they reinstate physical separation, in every sense, of Ireland with Northern Ireland, for example. People forget that in 1945 there was a European war, terrible features. And also the last race on European soil in the former Yugoslavia, was due to the question of nationalities.
You participated in the tribute to British pop music of the closure of the London Olympic Games. There was a sense of collective unity very striking.
CL: Do not forget that the Olympics were understood in England as the London Olympics, and that helped everyone got on the same car.
NT: But apart from that, everyone, regardless of class, origin or money, considered the music that has been made in Britain in modern times, not as something you, your personal assets and sentimental, but as one of the hallmarks of the country within and outside its borders. And that is fine, because those who are dedicated to pop music somehow comforts us considered ourselves part of cultural expressions traditionally higher views.
CL: Even though we had timed just two minutes, we are very pleased and proud of how we came out.
N.T.: ... yes, yes, it was very good show that one of the best ways to praise our country is to remember the extraordinary and varied music that has emerged in the last 50 years.
Going back to why I would ask that after all this time ...
C. L.: ... what do you want? What work harder? (Laughs)
... No, they have a unique position to comment on the health of the current electronic music.
NT: It's in an excellent time, especially since it has become an ingredient of the music scene in the United States. Dance music enjoys his life there ... perhaps since the days of disco. The popularization of electronics and technology has greatly facilitated things.
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