With the echoes of his latest danceable album still in his head (Miqui Puig Canta, Vol. 7, Primavera Labels) the renowned musician and disc jockey Miqui Puig is preparing to hold a circular concert, where he will be accompanied by the Associazione Ciclistica Popolare to getting into the middle of the dance floor and making the entire public that attends the Estrella Damm Factory this Thursday dance (Make Miqui Puig Great Again, 8 p.m.), a task for which he is well prepared thanks to his musical repertoire, to which he adds experience as a dj and in charge of the millennial radio program Pista de fusta
How did you come up with the idea of ??a circular concert?
I had been after this show for a long time. It all comes from a day when we arrived at a bar during Primavera als Bars in a very small place where they put us in a corner, where there was no way to show off. So we tried to play in the middle of the people, in a circle, and since there was already a whole wave in the boiler rooms, it seemed like a very fun thing to me, because you have the people around you and they are much more attentive. It is a way of breaking barriers in the sense of the rock concept. My entire repertoire is dance, and since the last album is very danceable and we have adapted the entire repertoire of Miqui Puig and some pieces from Los Sencillos to dance, this group has even more alibi. The dream is that people start dancing right there in the middle, just because, because it is very inclusive and very fun. We will have to do the repertoire in conventional festival settings.
The goal is for people to dance
In the repertoire there are songs from Los Sencillos, songs from all my solo albums and songs that were even more rock. Now they all go through that, through drum machines, through a slightly more danceable rhythm.
The sounds are retro, but the bases are modern
Totally, we are obsessed with many young producers and of course, imagine, doing a dance music program I listen to this music every day, and you see how what people do is almost redesign, they do “ferranadrianismes” with past rhythms and sounds, which is what really excites me.
Has the work in Pista de fusta made you change your musical taste?
Yesterday I was in the car listening to music and I thought that I’ve been like this all my life, in fact I’m one of the mods that makes the journey of black music over the sixties and I hang on to it until I get to house, and in the 90s with the Sonar explosion and all that I am one of those who really embrace this religion. Now I hardly listen to anything else, and every time I pick up a guitar record at home to listen to it again I feel like I’m stepping out of line. But the album and the live show are also full of guitars, I’ve always liked this wedding between electric guitars and dance, it’s very cool and comes from a long way, not from the 90s or the 80s, but from much earlier.
This experimentation through urban music is becoming very fashionable
Here is a bit of a hoax, because urban productions at the moment are the most in vogue because the tools are much easier. Now there are a couple of platforms where musicians don’t even have to program drum machines, they download almost entire songs made just with a wav hit. It is another tool, another way of working and sometimes it is confusing. People make dance music because it’s the easiest, there’s a double standard, but we’re enjoying and living an incredible moment with everything dance music is.
Miqui Puig sings Vol. 7, is the third album in five years
We invest so much money and recover so little that in the end we either continue greasing the machinery or we don’t get there. If I said that I’m a singer-songwriter and I did it with guitars, maybe they would take me differently, but I’m a singer-songwriter who makes dance music, and they take it as a light thing, much more passable. But I have some lyrics that are anything but light, like when I title a single Pors Puig, or when I make a song called Raros where I expressly mention the names of many pioneers who are now in vogue. What I have not done and will never do is justify myself or sell a single based on these issues. I think that it is a bit what is happening now, that there are people who come more speech than songs.
Sometimes a promo sheet X is bought before a song. Raúl, my partner and director of the band, asked me why do you want to finish if you don’t know how to do anything else, if you know how to make songs and they are beautiful? You keep track of bands that were supposed to break up five years ago and are no more. It’s very hard to continue, to maintain structures, to pay for records, which is what we ended up doing. I find it very funny when we talk about independence and non-independence. When you pay for your product you are independent, and I have paid for all my solo albums. In the end, everyone chooses how they spend what they earn.
Now we are preparing new songs that we don’t know where they will go, in the new show we will premiere some. The idea is for things to happen and above all to have a defensible structure, I’m not saying maintainable anymore because on Thursday we went out to lose. Not even to tie, we lose, but I think it has to be presented.
How does preparing the record in vinyl format affect when preparing the songs?
I think about them differently and I order them differently, a bit like I order the radio program. There I go making a list of songs that I want to play during the week, and starting a program with one bit leads to another. During the pandemic we were preparing a cover album that in the end we didn’t do, it was an album that wanted to be that, like a mixtape, a non-stop, which is what the show will be. In the end, where I have achieved it is in the show this Thursday, where we will do a theme of a song from the Singles and we will splice it with a bit of my album, mixing as if it were a great session, but with the show. The record goes a bit like this, vinyls have to be less than 22 minutes per side, and that’s how we ordered it. How much do we carry? How much do we have? If we have these compasses, how much do we keep? For side A we will finish with this one, we will start with the other.
The first song on the album, Pors Puig, what fear are you referring to?
Everyone, the song already says it, I’m very insecure. People think that Miqui Puig is very vehement, very “echao palante” and I am afraid of everything. I am afraid of the concert on Thursday, every time I release an album I am afraid of criticism, sometimes unfounded, I panic on the networks for a few years The song explains that one thing is the facade and the other is reality, which is the truth.
His work in the media has allowed him to save music, his music, he has not touched it when he could have made more commercial songs.
You have to be consistent with what you do. Miqui Puig is a brand, a way of doing things, and I have never believed beyond that. I really want it, I have a great time and when someone shows you their respect I am happy. What happens is that it is not enough either, you have to chop a thousand stones and be fashionable. I keep making records and people congratulate me, but are you scheduled in a thousand places? No. Do you have more followers than before? No, but you still do it. Sometimes someone tells you that you are a failure, and no, sorry, a failure is the one who does not continue, the one who at a given moment abandons everything, and we continue making songs for 100, for 200, for 1000 or whatever lack.
Do you still define yourself above all else as a musician?
Everything is an alibi to continue adding fuel to the machine. The radio has been good to me all my life, before the Singles I was already doing municipal radio, like those of the great canters. Not the podcasts, not the new radio, which I’m a fan of. But it seems that sometimes they are waves and that we forget things.
