The Congosound, the musical alter ego of Carles Congost (Olot, 1970), was born in the mid-nineties. It was then that the artist launched, together with Vicent Fibla (La Ràpita, 1970), this particular musical-performative project that has been transformed and articulated with the rest of his work in the field of image, publication and video. . Explicitly or implicitly, music has always occupied a central place in Congost’s work, understood as artistic production but also as a tool for prospection, interrogation and representation of the cultural context from which this same artistic production emerges. Inspired by the pop iconography and youth culture of the late 20th century, The Congosound has always functioned in this way as a meta-referential musical artifact or, as curator Manel Clot wrote in 1995 in his text for the homonymous exhibition organized at La Capella , as an “authentic project category”.

In its first incarnation as a musical band, The Congosound took the trio format and included the participation of Jessie Park, a supposed muse of the Barcelona scene who appeared as a guest star on the single The Congosound Featuring Jessie (1998, Cosmos Records). Congost’s project was thus situated at the heart of an effervescent musical ecosystem that emerged under the protection of a thriving Sónar festival and that was going to turn post-Olympic Barcelona into one of the main world capitals of electronic music. In the ninth edition of the festival, held in 2002 (and still remembered for the image of Maradona on the poster), The Congosound debuted live, just after the release of their album Jackson. In addition to making the audience dance, that performance was intended to highlight the conceptual nature of the project as well as its desire to examine some of the sonic and iconographic conventions of club culture from a critical and ironic perspective.

In 2007 The Congosound published the compilation Say She’s Your number One – Jessie’s best, included in the monograph Say I’m Your number One that the MUSAC dedicated to Congost’s work. For the occasion, the museum hosted the presentation of Congosound’s Live Prototype, a scenographic device with sinuous retro-futuristic lines that, using three actor-replicants, converted the trio formed by Congost, Fibla and Park into a franchise group capable of playing telematically and regardless of the physical presence of its busy components. Through this performance based on the action of being absent, the project redoubled its provocative critical and conceptual charge beyond the strictly musical. Five years later, without Jessie’s participation, The Congosound published Pepsi Love, the last work in which Vicent Fibla was going to participate and where Ryan Paris (the singer and composer of the 1983 hit Dolce Vita) gave voice to the lyrics of Congost. The project thus acquired an unmistakable Italian accent.

Josep Xortó and the metamorphosis of Sabadell. This change in stylistic and temporal coordinates was confirmed in 2015 with Això que sona és nostre, the first reference signed by Josep Xortó The Congosound. The song is a Catalan version of Come On by the trio Jules Tropicana, the first reference published in 1983 by the Blanco y Negro label and one of the most paradigmatic titles of the so-called Sabadell sound. More than designating a genre, the label referred to a series of musical projects originating in Barcelona and surrounding areas inspired by the hedonistic sounds of Italodisco, Hi-NRG, electro or synth-pop. Sung in tacky English (although artists like Marc Bolta or Laura Martí did it in Catalan), it was common for these productions to be sold as imported music, hiding their true designation of origin. Ocells com tu, Josep Xortó’s long-form debut The Congosound is a tribute to that vibrant and singular scene.

As Congost points out, the latest metamorphosis of his musical project, with Josep Xortó as vocalist and frontman on stage, cannot be understood as a simple collaboration in the style of a featuring but as a creative joint venture between The Congosound and the versatile singer from groups like Stand up Against Heart Crime or Critters. Xortó, on the other hand, is accompanied by a series of musicians who, now, constitute an authentic and very reliable band in the strictest sense of the term. Another important novelty, Congost points out, is that having written the lyrics in Catalan has allowed him to put his ideas into words in a much more natural and precise way.

Thus, Ocells com tu functions once again as a sharp conceptual inquiry into pop culture and, at the same time, as a wonderful album from which, as Xortó sings, “flames come out”: flames of wit, fine irony and musical talent. The publication of the album coincides with the collaboration of Carles Congost and the British artist Jeremy Deller Music as a Foreign Language, an exhibition curated by Tolo Cañellas and which can be visited in Es Baluard (Palma de Mallorca) until March 10.