Marta Román: Love at first guitar smash

"I must have been about 15 or 16, I was in 2nd year of BUP, and I went to my friend Juan's house, an Iron Maiden fan, who had an Ibanez guitar connected to a distortion pedal in his room. Stroking the strings of that instrument and hearing the roar coming from the speaker captivated me." Leaning against the bar, with a freshly served and steaming morning decaf cortado, the composer, guitarist, and producer Marta Román recalls that teenage guitar strum that led to a solid and lasting love with music.

"In my youth, I played in several hardcore and punk bands in Santander, my city, until, through contact I had with people from the local hip hop scene, I started discovering funk and soul." The Great Black Music then entered her soul and has been marking her melodic coordinates: those that have led her to create the project The Blaxound. With this alias, Marta recently released her third album, El maravilloso sonido instrumental (The Wonderful Instrumental Sound), in the company of top-notch musicians such as organist Arecio Smith and percussionist Caspar St. Charles.

---As studio work, it's amazing, but you don't perform live much, do you?

---No, no, I like being in the studio, taking my time, working on the tracks. I play very little in public, and mostly out of obligation!

With exquisite sound finishes, the LP reflects the artist's passion for the classic sounds of funk, soul, and related genres, and earned her a nomination for album of the year by the prestigious magazine Enlace Funk, a veteran Spanish publication dedicated to black music. A moment she remembers with special affection and a touch of vindication. "I went to the gala and was surprised to see that I was, if not the only one, one of the very few women who were competing for the awards and who was not a singer. I think there needs to be a space where girls take on the role of producing and making their own music, controlling the process and beyond being just performers," she reasons while, in the background, the Changing light by her beloved Ironsides sets the rhythm of the conversation.

Two souls, almost three

In 2004, freshly arrived in the city, the local began studying at the Escola de Música Moderna de Badalona and, in parallel, setting up her studio. The place where she is visibly happy and where she is already concocting the next adventure of The Blaxound.

"I'm finishing mixing a ten-track album with singer Iván Espejo, always in the vein of a repertoire of vintage funk and soul, but sung in Spanish, losing the fear of making this type of music in a language other than English," she announces with an almost imperceptible tremor in her voice, which betrays tons of excitement.

Marta has two souls, one as a composer and musician, and another as a researcher. "When I came here to Barcelona to live, in 2003, I immediately had an interview with the Epidemiology Service of the Hospital del Mar Institute for Medical Research." It was the only job interview she had, as she has developed her career over these twenty years at that institute, where today she leads what is considered the state-level reference team in the evaluation of mammograms for breast cancer.

To these two souls, scientific and artistic, a third is added, eminently physical and dependent on the scraps of free time she has left, that of an unyielding mountain triathlon runner.

Culturally disarticulated city

The composer arrived in Barcelona twenty years ago, after a brief stint in London, with the idea of satisfying the cosmopolitan appetites that only the big city could quench and that in Santander were science fiction. "I am proud to have managed to maintain my roots with my family and my people, my origins, despite the distance that separates us," she points out.

The Barcelona she fell in love with is framed in a memory that ignites a singular sparkle in her eyes. "When I turned thirty, they organized a surprise party for me on the boat that La Fura dels Baus then had moored in the port. That July night, and its subsequent dawn, is something I will never forget."

However, something of that city of gentle light, beautiful summer nights, and stimulating atmosphere has, for the local, disappeared. "I have the feeling that Barcelona is culturally disarticulated, compared to how it was twenty years ago," she observes as she finishes her cortado, and regarding a life already settled in the city, but where mountain getaways are increasingly frequent.

---What is not disarticulated is the gastronomic offer of the Bar, in case you want to have lunch, as it is already noon.

Marta Román seizes the proposal on the fly: "well, let's see what you have on the menu, because the midday menu is something very typical here."

And, after a brief silence, with a wide and generous smile, she warns:

---And it better have dessert, eh! I'm very fond of sweets!