Not very freaky (en BcnWeek)

(published in BCNWeek Magazine, Barcelona, June 2006)

FASHION FREAK 2 /// SALA APOLO /// JUNE 8

Last Thursday night there were plenty of gente guapa at Apolo. All of them went to the club attracted by the promise of a free entrance to a fashion parade with original — or in some way different — clothing design. What they encountered was a group of dancers instead of models — which was a good thing, because it gave spontaneity to the performances and people didn’t get bored of the huge amount of designs on display: customized t-shirts, repeted trousers, and dresses or skirts made without detail. The excuse: the twenty designers participating were young people, not experienced, and this was an outlet for their creations. The problem is that in most of the cases, the creations were not very creative. Where did the freaks go? Not to Apolo, for sure. I spent an hour looking for a clue that would give me the idea of why an event like this is named Freak, but I couldn’t find one.

But not everything was bad. I enjoyed a good DJ (visuals were crap though), nice ambience, the possibility of being made up or combed by a professional agency or even being told my future by a funny fortune teller. Almost everybody I talked to, however, got the same fortune.

The moral? In Barcelona, kick a stone and you’ll find hundreds of frivolous events like this.

Tenori-On (en BcnWeek)

(published in BCNWeek Magazine, Barcelona, June 2006)

This has nothing to do with an opera tenor, or the archetype of the mujeriego, Don Juan. Dios me libre. Tenori-on is a machine created by Toshio Iwai, a Japanese shy guy that has visited our country severaltimes during the last decade — the last time was in September 2005 during the ArtFutura Festival. Now he is coming back to Sonar to introduce us to this incredible apparatus that combines a la perfección the creation of image and sound.

The Tenori-on could be an invention for videogame frikis, regarding Iwai’s past involvement in this industry. But the Tenori-on is much more than this. It is a novel digital instrument for playing sound and ambient light patterns that is operated by touching 16x16 LED switches. You could think of them as musical keyboards that respond to the subtlety of your finger touch by emitting light waves, creating afterglow, and making soothing sound sequences. Also, multiple Tenori-Ons can be networked together, creating Tenori-On orchestras. The philosophy behind it seems as lucid as its development: “A violin doesn’t work if any of its beautiful shape, sound quality, and usability is missing. However, electronic musical instruments often failto create this inevitable relation of shape, sound, and usability. My goalwith Tenori-On is to make it the right instrument for the real digital age by rethinking what musical instruments should be.”

Listening to him, his work sounds as if it was something normal, easy. At the end of the conversation, you realize that you are nodding like a tonta, completely convinced of the simplicity of everything. But immediately after that, the Tenorion in your hands, and Toshio authorizes you with a smile; “go ahead,play it”. You are frightened of breaking the mysterious instrument or, even worse, start playing it in a horse-with-a-piano style. Finally, your astonished air makes him laugh, and with the patience of a maestro he starts explaining the way the Tenori-on works while the improvised sounds start arising as if it was a studied musical composition. Now is when you understand:“Ok, Toshio, you’re right. Coming from you, everything can be that easy”.

Barcelona, desde abajo (en BcnWeek)

(published in BCNWeek Magazine, Barcelona, June 2006)

Hollyone, former porn star, 120 cm (vertically), gets sentimental.

He is Italian, but arrived in Barcelona twenty years ago. We could say that he knows the city very deeply — especially some parts of the night life that are little revealed to the rest of the citizens.

Although he retired one year ago and currently enjoys a simple life, he has spent part of his professional life acting in porn movies along side celebrated actors like Rocco Sifredi. Sex performances with one, two or even more astonishing girls was the day to day work for him during two decades, most of the time in Bagdad Café, the famous porn club opened in 1975. There, guests can enjoy all kinds of shows — like showgirls, lesbian duos, live sex… and also have the option to interact with the artists several times during the show.

“Bagdad has changed lately, adapting to the internet, for example. It is a reflection of how Barcelona has changed too during last years”, he reveals. “The city has improved, but the night life is getting worse”. Hollyone figures, with a sign of conviction, that when he arrived to Barcelona you could find many more clubs and after-hours. “Youngsters now are fed up, nervous, they don’t know how to drink or take drugs. The city has become more dangerous also.

”On the other hand, Barcelona has two secrets that make her mysterious and attractive, especially for tourists. Sex and night life. Everything considered, the city seems to tourists a sex paradise in Europe, at least when compared to the other European scenes. Hollyone (nobody knows his real name) agrees with me. “The city has plenty of brothels and prostitutes on the streets. I personally prefer Dutch showcases,” he says.” Also most of the Bagdad Café visitors are tourists “who expect to have an unforgettable experience here. They pay, and they have it in return.”