bradien + escoffet - pols

When Bradien started to plan their new album, not even they knew that it would end up becoming "Pols", a project that brought them together with poet Eduard Escoffet and that, in the simplest possible terms, could be described as an electronica and spoken word album. But it’s much more than that: “Pols” is a treatise in which poetry plays with the exotica, Japanese minimalist pop blends into flirtations with dub and timeless soundtracks are swathed in elusive samples and loops and the echoes of distant islands.

In June 2009, the group and the poet started working together. Bradien had just released “Linden”, a record that introduced them to a new audience and included a self-recited piece by US poet John Giorno (“Everyone gets lighter”), which Escoffet was asked to perform at some of their live gigs. The band wanted to continue working with the voice, and especially poetry, without forgetting that Bradien -Daniela Cugliandolo, Pope and Matías Rossi– is essentially an instrumental project, thus avoiding the more common patterns of the voice in pop. Eduard, meanwhile, wanted to carry on experimenting with the possibilities of text and keep exploring new channels for the diffusion of poetry.

In these two years of work and complicity, the project has changed its skin several times: Eduard’s profound voice, while appearing to float over themes, recites, chants and whispers verses that are sharp and poignant, yet also intimate and mysterious, in which the words play with each other and drift to the rhythm of trumpets, bass-lines, and typically Bradien-esque arrangements, which manage to make things optimistic, light and evanescent. Escoffet speaks in our ear to quiz us, and embrace us with his words: the hangover remains of a party, the corridors of a typical Barcelona’s Eixample flat, dark rooms, clear skies, people searching for space and spaces searching for people. Their first joint project is now appearing on spa.RK. “Pols” (a polysemous Catalan word that can be translated as “dust”, “pulse” or “poles”) was produced by Australian Simon Walbrook, and the result is a dialogue packed with a delicate crescendo of musical and textual nuances. Poems by Eduard Escoffet (except for the adaptation of “Poema idealista” by Felipe Boso) and music by Bradien, which continue their exploration of delicate electronica that unfolds like origami, where there is room for the band’s thousand influences. There is also origami on the cover – designed by Todojunto and printed and assembled in artisan fashion at L’Automàtica- which opens up to reveal further secrets of such a deliciously blunt album. Even at this stage of the game, there are still things that can surprise and unsettle us.