This Wednesday sees the Inaugural Day of the twenty-third edition of Primavera Sound in Barcelona. One of our favourite things about the festival is that it always ensures it shines a light on local talent coming from Barcelona, from Catalunya, from Spain…and this year is no exception.
From Wednesday concerts focusing on the emerging local talent will be taking place on the Primavera Pro stage at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in the heart of the city. Free to everyone, ticketholder or not, the performances will be open air and the best way to really discover what’s happening on the Spanish scene right now. You might even catch the next Rosalìa…
On the Primavera Pro stage, this Wednesday at 2010, Remei De Ca La Fresca from Arbúcies, north-east from Barcelona will be playing. Now the band are not keen on definining themselves with the constraints of a genre, but what we can tell you is that their track Mal De Muntanya was in our Top 10 Spotify Wrapped for 2024. Previously they have taken the structures of M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes’ and Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’ and written their own lyrics. Their most recent album, L’Ham De La Pregunta, addresses the band’s views on everything from the genocide in Gaza to the corruption of the water distribution in Catalunya. Loverboy caught up with them to find out more about their story and the Catalan scene…
Hello, Remei De Ca La Fresca! We’ve been doing some Google translating but we wondered if you could tell us how you decided on the band name and how it might translate in English?
Literally, in English would be something like ‘Remedy from the fresh house’. Remei in Catalan means ‘remedy’ but also, it’s a traditional woman’s name. And ‘fresca’ (fresh) is an adjective usually used to refer to woman who doesn’t care much about anything. But it can also be used in a pejorative way, more like ‘bitch’ (but softer). That’s something that we like about our name, that it can be interpretated in many different ways, so you can take what you need from it.
So ‘Ca’ is connected to ‘House’?
Exactly! ‘Ca’ is like the French ‘chez’ and it expresses this belonging to a house or a family.
In the drag world it is common to have a ‘House’ of ‘Chosen family’ when maybe relations with blood family do not exist. Do you have a family dynamic like this in the band? Do you have connections with the LGBT performing scene in Barcelona?
In Arbúcies, our hometown, when old people don’t know you, it is common for them to ask ‘Which ca are you from?’ But because none of us belong to one, we have created our own. It’s funny, because now when people see us in the streets of Arbúcies they call us ‘The ones from Ca la Fresca’. We actually don’t have many connections with the LGBTQI+ scene, but they are one of the main scenes in Catalunya right now and they are doing a great job for the collective’s rights and for Catalan language. Maybe because we are not from Barcelona and we don’t have a determined musical genre, we feel that we still don’t belong to any scene.
The band formed during lockdown in 2020. How did having the band to focus on change your experience of that time? Do you think you would have emerged with the same tones of anger whether the lockdown happened or not?
Actually, those tones of anger, came later. Our first album, Remei de ca la fresca, is naiver and has kind of a strange vibe because of the lockdown and the weird times we lived through. Of course, it affected our music, but every context does. Like for example, being a beholder of the genocide in Gaza, the water plundering in our zone or man’s abuse have determined the tone of our second album (L’ham de la pregunta) which, indeed, is full of anger.
The album has a great mixture of sounds on there. What’s your opinion on genres – for better or for worse? How do you describe your music when people ask?
We are not married to any genre. Nor do we listen to just a single kind of music. Starting a new song is like starting a new world. It is our adult playground where we are free to play whatever we want in the way we want. In reality, when we were making the album, we thought they didn’t have anything in common. We weren’t able to see the connection until we finished it all. At the end of the day, you are the one making your own music, so you are the connection. Even though you can create so many different universes, there aren’t infinite possibilities inside you in a specific time and place. So, you’re limited and these limits are going to be the coherence in everything you do.
We love ‘Mal De Muntanya’. A lot. Could you tell us more about the message in the song?
We are from Arbúcies, a little town in the middle of the mountains of Montseny. This area is known for its dense forests and its water. Because of that, since the 90’s, there’s been an increasing amount of water businesses. In just Arbúcies, we have four water bottling plants (between them, Nestlé, which is also causing big trouble with water in South America), but there are many more around. They are very opaque companies and it’s difficult to know the real data, but the neighbours have organised themselves in order to count how much water is being taken and only from our town they calculated around 5 million litres per day. Meanwhile, we have been going through a deep drought and water limitations for the house consumption. In Arbúcies, people already say that there’s more water going on the road (on the trucks) that on the creek. Water is already listed on the stock market. This is criminal and, sadly, it’s going to be the war of our times. But when people are thirsty, as well as when they are hungry, they can be really powerful. This is what ‘Mal de Muntanya’ is about.
The production and shift musically through ‘De Cara/Esmolada’ is so good. Can you tell us about this song and the production choices?
We are deep fans of Rosalía, so we wanted to make a song with some of her sonority. We haven’t played a lot with vocal plugins, so we wanted to try them with this one. So it’s our first song with autotune or pitch corrects. We also played a lot with percussion chops, like Rosalia does.
This song talks about the abuse young girls suffer from grown men in positions of power. This song is a threat, rather than a complaint, because these men should be the ones to be afraid, not the other way around.
You have a song that uses ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A. I wondered how you related to her or your opinions of her.
We don’t know much about M.I.A, apart from her documentary and a couple of songs. We really liked ‘Paper Planes’ and we wanted to make a version so hard, adapted to Catalan, to our reality and to our sound. We mashed it up with a traditional song from our town which is the intro of our version ‘Tot el que volem és okuparr-te el xalet’.
As M.I.A uses the prejudices against immigrants to make kind of a satire in her song, we wanted to make a satire with the prejudices the conservative people have with the left-wing young people. The tittle means ‘All we want is to squat your chalet’ and it follows saying things like ‘When you get distracted for a moment, we will turn your children gay, left-wing, dirty, terrorist and delinquent.’
M.I.A.’s story, explained in the documentary, was very interesting, but lately, she has been showing support to Trump and saying lots of bullshit on Twitter, so she doesn’t seem interesting anymore.
What are you looking forward to at this Primavera Sound showcase?
There’s this belief that if you sing in Catalan, you can only be listened to by Catalan speakers. We want to break with that (as many bands have done before) and we want to play in front of people from all around and let the music speak.
Who else do you want to see at the festival?
We want to see Red Stamp, Idles, Charli XCX, Fointanes D.C., Caribou, Beach House…but actually, what we like the most is to get surprised.
Us too! Give us a good Catalan expression to shout at a band we’re enjoying!
‘Quin llamp de grup!’ that literally means ‘What a lightning of band!’
Finally we are named after the song by Mariah Carey. So we always ask what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
So sorry, but we don’t know anything about Mariah Carey, except this typical Christmas song and her characteristic whistle singing…that we are not very keen on. But we will listen to Loverboy and give her a second chance in your honour 🙂
The Primavera Pro stage opens Wednesday 4th June from 18h30 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) with the opening day of Primavera Pro, organised by Catalan Arts.
Remei De Ca La Fresca play Wednesday 20h10.
Band photo by Noemi Elias.
