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It has not been easy to arrange a conversation with Joan Miquel Oliver. After several schedule changes, we caught him at El Prat airport, halfway through a return operation between Lleida and Palma. And precisely, in his new album Elektra, there is a piece that talks about the capital of the Lleida region, Segrià. It is called Me'n vaig a viure a Lleida—I'm going to live in Lleida. According to its author, "I wrote this song on October 2nd last year after the police charges in Catalonia. I was in Barcelona, I saw them, and I freaked out. The next day, when I was already home, commenting with a friend, he told me: what a mess, I'm going to live in Lleida... I'm going there, I want to live alone and I don't want to know anything about this story. I found that 'I'm going to live in Lleida' funny, as if Lleida were Mars. And I wrote a song about that lamentable day."
Elektra closes a trilogy started in 2015 with Pegasus, and which continued with Atlantis in 2017. The three albums share a cover by painter Albert Pinya, but beyond this fact there are other common elements: "Surfistes en càmera lenta (2005) and Bombón mallorquín (2009) were a bit like a tentative exploration. Pegasus was my first album after the dissolution of the group Antònia Font, it was like it was serious now. I think we can define Pegasus as landscape, Atlantis as the characters within this landscape, and Elektra is more first-person. They are combined themes. As for the album's vibe – he continues while a loudspeaker voice announces flights to unexpected places – I think Elektra would be a synthesis of the two previous works: the first was closer, the second more epic, and this one has depth and proximity at the same time."
"Sometimes a song can be very complicated, but other times it can also be very simple – he states –. I have experimented a lot with it. I must have written about 200 songs and I have wanted to try everything, from making very elaborate songs and taking a month to fit the last syllable, to planning to make five in one day."If Oliver cooked the first two volumes of the trilogy alone in the studio, this time he has done it with keyboardist Jaume Manresa (ex-Antònia Font) and drummer Xarli Oliver, who have accompanied him in live shows in recent years, and who sign with him the production of the work. "With Atlantis –explains the musician– I finished finalizing my relationship with synthesizers, which is a very solitary, very laboratory-like job. After 150 concerts with Xarli and Jimmy, I wanted to somehow reflect all the improvisations we had achieved live. I wasn't looking so much for a sound as an experience, for the music they have to contribute things, the simple fact of playing and recording with them." Joana Gomila's voice on four tracks completes the list of associates in the production. "Joana –he praises– is a type what so much music in her head and heart! She's a crack, I was blown away! She doesn't think, she just starts singing and does it wonderfully. And I say she doesn't think in the good sense of the word, huh?", she clarifies.
Joan Miquel Oliver vindicates the virtues of songs. "Sometimes a song can be very complicated, but at other times it can also be very simple –he states–. I have experimented a lot with it. I must have written about 200 songs and I have wanted to try everything, from making very elaborate tracks and taking a month to square the last syllable, to planning to make five in a day. Of these songs, the ones you make five in a day, I call them little songs: they are nice, close, and human things, with which everyone can identify. They are not a thesis or an intellectual activity. They are spontaneous, with a natural language. And I would say that in Elektra that is what prevails: songs that have been made quickly, without much thought, seeking spontaneity and the most direct possible communication with those who listen to them."
"Now a lot of feminist literature has emerged that interests me a lot. The truth is that these women break many schemes, and with good reason. We have a lot to learn, we must make this effort to see this more feminine part of the world and move towards effective equality"
However, we should not confuse the simplicity that Joan Miquel Oliver advocates with plainness. The songs of Elektra have been crafted with all the demands, and in many cases, they provoke interesting social reflections. Let's look at a couple of examples, starting with the track that gives the album its title: "Now a lot of feminist literature has emerged that interests me a lot. The truth is that these women break many schemes, and with good reason. We have a lot to learn, we must make this effort to see this more feminine part of the world and move towards effective equality. I am also very interested in mythology, and I thought that the myth of Electra is one thousand percent current." Another track from the album, Hipotèrmia, introduces us to a very peculiar eponymous character: "Hipotèrmia –the author points out– is a girl who suffers a lot. She is always cold, and because she is so strange she has no friends, people look at her badly. She is a discriminated person, just as others are discriminated against for being too tall, too short, or whatever. The song talks about discrimination, and I mix that with mythology, placing Hipotèrmia as a goddess of Olympus. It is a song against discrimination that also talks about thermal disability, ha, ha ha!"
Feminism, marginalized people... Can we see a political slant in Joan Miquel Oliver's latest work? The interested party does not shy away from the question: "If being against discrimination or patriarchy is politics, then yes. Or if talking about the events of October 1st, which I found to be a brutality, outrageous, is politics. Things have changed a lot since the nineties. There are circumstances that should make us think, and demands that for me make perfect sense," our Little Martian from Olympus concludes.