MARIA COMA

Skies and cats

“El meu cap es ple de sons. Miri on miri, ho sento tot.  El món es fa gran i jo tinc mil orelles. No pretenc morir i fer les maletes”. I never heard a song of life and curiosity as beautiful as this Mil Orelles that Maria Coma delicately caresses in her first solo album, Linòleum (amniotic records, 2009). Its notes creep into our daily scheme and make it go red and surround it with skies full of juicy apples and salty desires with a treacherous and playful side. By opening our windows, we can redraw the ancient world mending all our dreams we thought broken forever. Our own sky may not wait.

Maria Coma began her recording career forming a duo with Pau Vallvé called U-mä and publishing a homonym album, U-mä (Error! Lo-Fi / u_mä, 2007). They described their own music as a mix of nostalgia, nature and homemade feeling, fruit of their daily experiences. They said its sound is like a mantra and created the bases of two of the most important creators in Catalan music. Pau Vallvé also accompanied her in Linòleum playing drums and bass and directing all the production and mix process.

The actual album starts Dormint (sleeping) whose sound is playful praying “please, don’t disturb my rest”. But vitality leads her music soon. Gat breaks everything because it sees life as a game and wants to share that playful view with all of us. “No et quedaràs orfe, nosaltres som bones persones”she sings to that cat that has playfully got into her life. Her music is dominated by a Cel salat (salty sky) introduced in a painful way at piano. That song is a truly beautiful tune. “Un paper ha caigut i els altres dubten, dos papers també i els altres tremolen, l’aire ja no és tan blanc i es desmunta el decorat”. Everything is fragile because it’s ephemeral but it’s deeply important to continue our dance despite of the black clouds. Maria goes on taking her piano by the hand towards her salty sky because “no podia ser per sempre el cel un decorat, ja us ho vaig dir que de paper no aguantaría gaire temps”. Our scenery is falling down but her next song Sempre és present starts full of energy and irreversible as time’s passage. Waters become calm in time for a reflexion but they return in a powerful way singing “ara què ha passat sinó el temps?”.

Ramats de pomes backs to imagination as a source of life. “Allà hi ha un os formiguer que et xucla aquelles llàgrimes si plores i et fa estar molt més content. Però amagat hi ha un rellotge molt atent i una pometa despistadeta”. All is volatile and stimulating. Life gets away but pushes you to go on living.

That album is an incessant ray of poetic creativity. Mil orelles (one thousand ears) is probably the song that better resumes the artistic soul of Maria Coma singing once again to life in the opposite sense that people use to. People get ager reducing their world’s view and also their illusion so they get resigned to a grey way of life. She refuses that strongly in Placenta singing “no vull començar a morir com tothom que no en sap del tot de ser feliç”. It’s sad and raw but deeply true. Maybe her apples branch could take us to better skies.
 

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Photos by Ibai Acevedo