And with modesty, Quimi Portet | Music

I read A smoking by Mossèn Cinto who wonders what birds say with their songs. For example. “The rooster gets up early in the morning, but not to follow the Council of the Oreneta and go to Montserrat, but to get to Baladre as a marmany of the square:-I am from Vic. I am from Vic. As if we were given something that was from Vic or Girona. ” The Little Folgueroles chaplain is right. In the end the words are left and it does not matter from where they are pronounced. Those of have gone to a book, Songs in Bell Llemosí (1987-2020)which publishes the second periphery and of which I receive the commission of eschatir from which stream they flow, so to speak with the romantic impact I find that the occasion requires. It also seems in the same opinion as Verdaguer the writer Kiko Amat, who in 2018 did a very good interview in Portet. It has that characteristic leave of condescension Xarnega, more focused on the ten years of rock star in the language of all Spaniards than in the reality of Catalan artisan singer -songwriter of the last thirty. CONTEXT: In 1998, E, a Panhispanic Success Set, dissolved, leaving six albums and a collection of royalties juicy that have allowed Portet, more or less, to the one who has appeared. In Catalan. This, according to Amat, is to “fold geographically and culturally”. Anyway. But the interview is very good.

Portet, a homeland

There, in the magazine Jot Downour self -proclaimed inter -county star is a “Catalan and Barcelona musician”. But today he receives me in the historic center of Vic, where he has been living and working for two decades, and he has a very strong sense of symbiosis and identification of the musician with the city. Unexpected, because nothing in Portet’s artistic production can make us think of an illustrious vigatà, such as those who lifted a Roman temple from a piece of Roc. Context: In the middle of the Renaissance, local prohoms such as the Canon Collell and Bishop Morgades, found in the middle of Vic the demanding remains of a temple of the first century and decided to reconstruct it from a tiny escape. With great desire, quite a few money and stone of folgueroles that they used to erect royal columns and self-medicate them. It is the method that Portet has used to build his viganity (which I interpret as his choice to take root a Catalan work), and he begins to explain it to the Vetust Sanctuary, now besieged by the scaffolding as all the important places in the country. Like the, like the one, like Catalonia itself. This decadentist tone is not theirs, it is mine, but although this is a dialogue, I am who wrote, as Kiko Amat wrote since his Bias Canallita.

Portet’s tone is that of an optimistic and enthusiastic person. “I will be punished for being so happy, but everything will be fine,” he suddenly comes out of a little Catholic fault, “thinks that I have a friend who tells me that I would have to be depressive, instead of antidepressants.” In fact, he is aware of the antibodies that their energy attacks can arouse, and constantly nuances them with ironies and deflades; A deep and severe aversion to the crush and transcendentality. “I have perfectly identified the moment I am starting to be happy: I was 15 years old and since then I have not stopped being. The world is a lot of fun! Everything makes laugh. ” With the goodness that characterizes him, Portet refuses to talk about what happened before this time of Epiphany. But then he lifted the flight of the Barcelona family nest that his parents had established and started a nomadic life. He has lived everywhere and the anecdotes he is letting go seem to certify it. Until twenty years ago he returned to Vic, the country of the grandparents, a kind of arcadia, although it is difficult for us to see the stigmatized region. A flat was bought in a historic building in the center and even had the position of President of the Community of Neighbors. “The legacy of my governing action was a ping-pong table,” which is still flashing, in the courtyard access to the stairs.

Inside the room, in a modest and cozy room like him, there are books, guitars and a kind of soundproof black cabin to record voices, which is like having a Tardis de Dr. Who in the dining room. Of the instruments, it is especially cofoi of a Gibson Les Paul that was bought in London in 1994 (“ This was a whim ”), and in the books I teach the Grammar of Jeroni Marvà with which he learned Catalan in the long journeys by bus for Spain on the tour of El Lasto. “Everyone was in hangover and I took the opportunity to learn English with a teacher we rented, read the full work of Josep Pla and learn Catalan. Think that at school I was not taught. The language is everything. ” However, “all generations have thought they were the last, it is nothing more than a vanity.” Portet is a bibliophile, with an elegant Etruscan exlibris made by Professor Graziani of Naples, and has a special penchant for grammars, languages ​​and anything informative that awakens his curiosity. Now read Montaigne, in this French pre -revolutionary that seems a bit Catalan. With the second beer I encourage myself to confess that the last one of the row never interested me very much, for Spaniards. And I apologize because now that I have heard them as a big one, because they were not so bad. “No, if I would have done like you, but you have to think that it was part of it.” Unquestionable, but I notice a bit of fear of what I can write and eager to please, as if it were more important the health of the conversation than the truth. Shut up that is not the case. My suspicions are faded and the topic is molded: “Look, I was already tip, of the tours of El Lasto. In fact, things are simpler, and that story ended because I was a father and having a girl is incompatible with life on the road. Since then, since the ten -year stage was closed, I have only taken a plane twice. To go to a wedding in Morocco and a burial in Ibiza. ” Understood. CONTEXT: Now, not long ago, Quimi Portet is an extraordinarily dynamic and attractive grandfather, a great poet of small life, who says things as “it is much more fun to disappear.” His clean lives in Taradell, nine kilometers from Vic.

Portet, a poetic

We are going to have lunch. It takes us to a place called Fonda, but it is a very civic restaurant where it is eaten reasonably well. Behind the table is a large painting with a painted sausage that helps me not to lose sight of the Quimi Portet trap. A very well -orchestrated trap consisting of hiding a colossal artist behind a facade of everyday affability. The goal is always to reduce the ego and grandiloquence, but the sausage is there, persistent. The same thing happens with the Portet songs. I am admitted that he likes to make noise and that the naked lyrics of music, now that we have the opportunity to read them in the monastic gathering of paper, they cannot disguise what they are: a genuine poetry, a language that has inoculated us without realizing it. He continues with the tactic of presenting himself as “Lo Bell butcher”, a “Espaviladet guitarist”, “Half Verdaguer and Half Tarzan”, but the book threatens his characteristic flight below the radar and the first voices that claim one have already been heard. It would be a misfortune, but it could hardly argue against it.

I am looking for a synthesis, a haiku who represents the way Portet joins the words, and I propose: “We will graze between the lilies / around Sant Andreu, / Pixant we will make a aim with the snowmen”. A little bucolic pastoral care, a pinch of ironic tradition, a stretching to dislike. It is almost a master formula that we can find repeated on many occasions, especially from the author and publisher they have dubbed the “second period”, from 2004 and the false exile in Vic. We like an example of the “ equivocal and beast lyricism ”, and confesses that this liberating eschatology, so Catalan, has been a friction point with the island surrealism of Joan Miquel Oliver, who is more ethereal and less clinging to the shit of the Catalan mountain, which does not stink. We also talk about Sisa, Adrià Puntí or Albert Pla, but possibly Oliver is with whom he has found the most artistic confluence in recent times. I continue to have a preferred record of a pre-era of high style purification, the 1999 electromagnetic songbook, and Portet is right for me, but only to make me feel good. Thank you, teacher.

“The sacrality of music has been lost. Before, when we had a Vespino and four albums, music was a very important thing and now it is something more. But I am motivated to make a record just as in 1975 “. This is the answer, zigzagging, to the question of whether there will be more Portet songs, because we have not been new since 2018 and has just planted us a written “legacy”. But he does not want to hear of wills. “At my age, talking about death is a patxanguero topic.”

Portet, a modesty

In the song ‘Francesc Pujols’, Quimi Portet urges a kind of canon, a list of great names linked to a poetic and musical tradition of the country. In fact, Pujols is not interested in mystique, as others, but the anecdote, which is always juicy. “We are a country of artists educated in originality, romanticism and voluntarism and we are secretly proud of not being a practical culture. That is why we have not disappeared. ” This list makes no sense or cohesion, and he is naturally included. We should move from the Honor Award and go from PET to postulate the Nobel. Everything will be fine. I love you, tortilla.