palabras ROB PEREZ

For anyone who wants to hear what the future will sound like, listen to the Pinker Tones remix album, More Colours, the follow-up remix to their amazing third album, Million Colour Revolution. The Pinker Tones have recorded an energetic, utopian, artistic masterpiece with an eclectic roster of equally talented artists. Kinky, Nortec Collective, The Torpedo Boys, artists from Russia, England, South Africa, Argentina and all over the world are represented in what is easily one of the year’s best albums, with non-stop, incredible, great music.

Speaking to Mr. Furia, who with Professor Manso make-up The Pinker Tones, Furia describes their music as: Very cinematic. Fantastic music to fantastic images, with [a] fantastic sense of humor. We don’t like to take ourselves too seriously. Then it becomes very boring. If you want to have a laugh about the rest of the world, you have to start with yourself.

Although The Pinker Tones don’t take themselves too seriously, they have garnered a serious, worldwide following, with shows that can only be described as a dynamic DJ session, but with the energy of a rock band. Expect their next album, scheduled for an early 2008 release, to surprise a lot of people, while invoking The Pinker Tones trademark of reinventing themselves, as always, on every album.

How would you define The Pinker Tones music?

We are very hungry music consumers. We’ve always been very eclectic music consumers as well. The result is there in our music. One journalist made a pretty fine description of what we do. He called it “Retro Futuristic Eclectism.” [Laughs] So I think that’s quite a good description of what we do.

When you and Professor Manso first formed The Pinker Tones, were there people who didn’t get your music, didn’t share your vision?

We were quite lucky. Obviously, any start with any band is difficult in the beginning. To get yourself in a position which people get really interested in your music is not easy, even if you’re convinced of what you are doing. It’s a factor of perseverance; just keep bugging people, and then finally meet the result of what we are doing. We’ve been very fortunate to get all the awareness we are having and to be touring all around the place. The very first edition of our very first single, the whole edition was sold in Japan because the distribution head heard the demo, and he bought the whole edition. So that was the first record we ever sold. It went directly to Japan. We’ve been very lucky. We’ve built up a team of people who work for us, and who are really into spreading “The Pinker Gospel.” [Laughs] Without those people, you can make the best music you want in your studio. If you don’t have the people who then make the effort to get the awareness for this music, it’s useless. So they get the credit as well.

Where do you get your musical ideas from?

More Colours is more electronica approached in many ways. And sometimes not. Sometimes it’s acoustic versions, and sometimes its alternative versions, etc. But when we compose our songs, the process is very, very analog. What we actually like to do is create our own samples. And to produce we have a lot of gifted musicians. We play most of it ourselves, but then every once in a while we had a few collaborations in the album. For instance, the grand piano on “Pink Freud” those great arrangements were made by a local pianist in Barcelona. And there were a few other things. But most of it we did ourselves.

Who were the people that believed in you, that thought your music could appeal to the masses?

There were a bunch of people actually. We’ve been very lucky to build this little team. Probably the first key person who believed in The Pinker Tones was Mark, our manager. Together with him we created Pinkerland Records to gain more independence. We created the label to protect the band from the big companies. So the licensing from this little tiny label we had, we went all over the world. Mark has been a key person in this process. Musically, there have been many artists who have been supporting us, and probably More Colours is nice proof of that, of all the support and all the respect we’ve been getting throughout our travels around the world.

Did you and Professor Manso grow up with a lot of music around?

Oh yeah! Obviously, the first thing you listen at home are your parent’s records. We were both quite fortunate to have good music in our environments where we grew up. But then we’ve also been friends forever, since we were teenagers. So in school, obviously you get a lot of new influences, and for a time you want to forget about what you’re listening to at home. And then a few years later you realize that actually, that stuff was really good. So you listen to it again and again. But yeah, we’ve always been, from a very tender age, very massive music consumers and big fans. We feel very fortunate to be doing what we really like most.

Do you ever tackle serious issues?

The Million Colour Revolution had some strong statements. “Karma Hunters” was written in the moment of when the war started. We were all upset by politicians. We were angry and then we thought, “Politicians don’t deserve our anger. Let’s just have a laugh. So we wrote “Karma Hunters” and we created these two little characters for the video. We like to approach serious things but always with a certain amount of humor. And not taking things too seriously.

What’s the music scene like in Barcelona?

The music scene is fantastic at the moment. There’s not only one scene, there’s like 2 or 3 different scenes at the moment, and all the scenes are very open-minded. It’s a mix of Latin and world music with electronica, with a new disco, rumba thing going on as well. And there’s also a very nice electro-pop scene. They interact, and it’s quite interesting what’s coming out of it. I think people have lost a lot of fear because of all this situation of the collapsing music industry. People have lost fear to do things as they want to, not what the label wants them to do, because there’s not much to lose anyway. On the artistic side it’s a very liberating situation for musicians at the moment.