This Monday Álvaro Pombo, author of books such as ‘Against Natura’ or ‘The Iridized Platinum Metro’, has turned 86. Hidrogenesse have always declared author’s followers. They say it is, nothing less, than his “favorite writer.”
Because Genís Segarra and Carlos Ballesteros want to celebrate him in life, they will dedicate their new album to music to music poems. It will not be a surprise for those who remember that 13 years ago they dedicated an entire album to Alan Turing. The first single of the project on Pombo has been published coinciding with this birthday, with a precious cover. It is called ‘Imagined is all’ and it is our song of the day for this Tuesday.
‘Imagined is all’ is inspired by ‘Variation 38º’, a poem of the book ‘Variations’, which Editorial Lumen took in 1977 and won the El Bardo award.
The text speaks of “imagined seagulls,” “more Allaás” and “more here” to reflect on the boundaries between reality and imagination, and about death and oblivion. If the first chorus is “imagined, it is all, even forgotten”, and the second “imagined is everything, to death,” the end is disregarded. After playing with the appeal of the imagination of imagination (“I imagined that I imagined your love, that it did not exist”), the letter concludes, by surprise that “oblivion and death were real, however.” If someone serves something, Astrud already titled an album ‘You do not exist’ in honor of the author.
With Clara Vinyals (Renaldo & Clara) to the electric guitar and Rodrigo Hernández (Alizz) to the drums, Hidrogegense offer a dreamy production, halfway between Kraftwerk and Desireles, which is accompanied by a kind of face B on the streaming platforms, ‘Imaginary instruments’. An instrumental adaptation of the same single.
Austrohungaro’s own note recalls that «Álvaro Pombo is perhaps the most important living writer in Spain. He has won numerous prestige awards, he is a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and has just received the Cervantes 2025 award, one of the main recognition to Spanish and Hispanic -American writers ».
For Hidrogenesse, «Musicar the poems of Álvaro Pombo is a challenging idea that we have for a long time and that we have tried several times. Finally we have now found the way to address with music the variety of forms, themes and structures of their poems. In this project we want to focus on the texts and radiate the wonderful poetry of Álvaro, much less known than his work as a novelist, and take it to the field of popular song, of pop music. The ambition is also to create a musically interesting and memorable work, accompany the poems with precious music, and try in each song to try things that we have not done before ».
On the other hand, Hidrogenesse are immersed in the composition and production of Martin’s new album. We have talked to Martin especially.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y33Tyzktoka
