bruna - thence

From: Spa.rk:

Big hopes spring forth, and we’re going all-in with our chips here. The year may have only just begun, but this is no time for false modesty: "Thence", bRUNA’s new album, is one of the records of the year. On the back of the immense "And it matters to me to see you smiling", released on spa.RK in 2009, and which so many magazines and playlists considered to be the album of the year, Carles Guajardo has launched the follow-up to his breakthrough debut disc that so infectiously glossed together all the fleeting melodies and intense melodrama. And it has been through interposed distance, by leaving behind a seminal project that brought him such exaggerated praise, that Thence came into being: farewell to emotional therapy, hello conscience.

It’s the same old bRUNA, but it’s different. Behind these tunes we find the same impassioned artist that we discovered five years ago, but here, in a kaleidoscopic leap between decades –from the late 80s to the mid 90s-, Thence is a treatise that explores the vitality and intensity of an era that left us at the gates of Sónar, which bRUNA honours in 1996 (you know how it felt to be outside Sónar main room at four in the morning with the sound of Orbital pumping in the background?). Carles, the attentive spectator, the club voyeur, the musician who the mind imagines at the bar listening to what’s cooking on the dancefloor, prodigiously crystallises that whole world in Thence. It’s there in the chunky basslines that dance between the decades, the hip house keyboards, the air of 1989 new beat on his yellow Sony walkman, those voices so 1992, the shine that reminds us that –yes, siree- this is fantasy. Fantasy via loudness, where Carles lets loose his craft, his unique ability to lift us with his huge trademark melodies, intense like there’s no tomorrow. Press play for Ever after, and it all becomes dazzlingly clear.

"Thence". Dance. The artist has overcome his fear of the dancefloor, a feeling that we sensed in some of his earlier collaborations, but not without first rebranding it with vaporized voices, flashes of light, spluttering violins and multicolour neon. bRUNA has no intention of taking us into the synthetic paradise of dance for the mere sake of it: the luminosity and intrigue of his music are the essence of that process. It might sound like dance music, but it’s also majestic, it’s liquid ecstasy. Thence is a constant flash of sentiments, the condensation of a particular legacy, a refresh of our musical baggage, as each of the twelve tracks spring our memory banks into life. It’s light, it’s optimism, it’s the spark we were waiting for in times that are flying by.

Thence is pure emotion. Word.