“If you play and have fun, you can’t lose,” reasons Iván Ferreiro, explaining the sensations he had while experimenting with the synthesizers that give shape to Trinchera pop, the first work he has published in seven years split by the blissful pandemic. An album in the one that the Ferreiro brothers, Iván and Amaro, have opened up to experiment with the aim of rediscovering the pleasure of composing and playing without worrying about the result.
“I was very bored looking for the song on the piano”, explains Iván, who found the solution in electronics and software. “I wanted to live with music and be excited again, have fun with it,” he says, recalling the long months of confinement that he spent locked up at home discovering the world of synthesizers, his new toy. “I had the feeling that I was inventing the music for myself,” he explains, although the end result was the same notes as always, and a sound that was easy for fans of the former leader of Los Piratas to identify. “In the end it always sounds like us, we can hardly run away from certain things, from my throat, but I can try to get emotional in another way and use my maturity to build something different.”
“Is the record pop music?” Amaro asks, “we only know that we have built it with a lot of things from pop culture, we have recycled a lot of things”. Some are as striking as the tune from El hombre y la tierra by Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente with which he begins La humanity y la tierra, in which they also have the support of Tanxugueiras. Or Vivaldi’s Spring that is heard at the beginning of the last song, and which gives the album its name, In the trenches of pop culture. “Vivaldi is the poppiest artist in classical music, and Primavera is his great hit”, reasons Ivan, who throws a cape at pop music from his particular trench. “Many people don’t like the word pop because they think it’s something superficial, light”, comments Iván, a way of understanding this style with which they don’t agree; they defend the importance of popular culture in coping with our lives. “You have a bad day, you come home and, if there is a series you like, or a garbage program, you watch it to face the next day,” he reasons, and concludes that, sometimes, to solve a problem “you do You need to be able to disappear from it, go anywhere”.
Pop trench reflects a change of priorities in the theme of the songs with respect to previous works. Love stories have given way to reflection on how to face life when youth has already been left behind. “The challenge was to get excited without the basic themes that we used, and I thought a lot about philosophy, and also about that phrase by Borges who says that he tried several times to study metaphysics but happiness always interrupted him”, comments Iván, and remembers that both he and his brother are back from everything, in that happiness of which the Argentine speaks. “We have already built ourselves as people”, Amaro adds, “we know who we are and we must analyze the world from our point of life”.
It’s time to take life from another perspective, from those Lagrange points that allow you to float in the middle of the universe, or accepting defeat as On The Wire defends, “when you can’t take it anymore and people tell you to keep fighting, to fight , and I think, on the contrary, how cool it is to give up ”, points out Iván. A surrender that implies giving value to everything achieved so far, “sometimes we demand so much of ourselves that we end up feeling like failures for no reason.”
Where there is no surrender is in the effort to offer something new, with the trench as a metaphor for the effort to win back the public. “I want you to get excited about my records, but not because I’ve been around for many years, I don’t want to rest on my laurels, I don’t want to repeat formulas”.
