John Talabot on His New Alias OR, Surviving the Pandemic, and Building Something Real

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

OK, I'm back! A brief message for paid subscribers before we go any further: Paywalled content will resume next week, today and tomorrow I have some interviews to get out there...we'll be back in regular rotation in no time though.

Without further ado: The very excellent Catalonian DJ and producer Oriol Riverola—best known to the electronic populace as John Talabot—has been relatively quiet in the 2020s after closing out the 2010s with a few very solid Talaboman releases. He recently returned with a new alias, OR (get it?), and an accompanying new album, the AD 93-released Music for Empty Stadiums—which marks his first official full-length since the sensational John Talabot record fin from 2012. I hopped on a call with Oriol literally yesterday to chat through the pure terrifying ecstasy of his new music as well as his overall POV regarding dance music and the creative soul; the convo was extremely enlightening and went for over an hour, and I'm happy to present it here to you today. Check it out:

So you've been putting together a new studio.
Yeah. I've been trying to do that for three years, but now I found the right person to do it.

Walk me through that process a little.
Usually, studios focus a lot on technical things—it has to sound really good, it needs to be soundproof, it needs to have these specific conditions. I want my studio to be a really good-sounding studio, but my priority is for it to be a creative space. Sometimes, studios are so clinical and impersonal that it doesn't work like a studio for me. I need some personality— some materials that are inspiring or warm, that bring me a difference from my day-to-day life. Usually, I don't mix or master myself, so [the studio] has to be more inspirational than technical. So I was looking for someone that could have this sensibility to design my requirements as a creator.

Who did you end up finding?
I found someone really interesting—a really professional person—that's been involved in Rosalía's studio and Red Bull Music Academy, He's a super cool guy that understands my needs, what I'm looking for, and that maybe we lose some perfection in the sound so that I can earn a lot of security and time in the studio without being frustrated, tired, or not inspired.

You've released plenty of stuff since fin, but even considering your breadth of work, this record is quite a left turn. Talk me through how it came together.
We've went through a lot of information about the pandemic, which we don't want to hear anymore. But this album reflects a kind of anxiety I was experimenting in this moment of pandemic, for the first time in my adult life. I mean, I had problems in the past with my family—we had some issues—but in terms of a working perspective and the future, I felt, for the first time, really vulnerable—like my life was not sustainable anymore. I was having these panic attacks with myself, where I invested 20 years of my life in trying to be the best in doing something. I don't know if I achieved it, but that was my goal—trying to become a good, professional musician and artist, trying to have a relationship with creation that is healthy, but also inspiring to others and within the label. Suddenly, people were telling me, "You have to reinvent yourself." I was like, "I've been trying to build this for 20 years, and now you're asking me to reinvent myself in two months?"

This anxiety, for me, was really extreme. I felt like, "Okay, maybe this is two months, but maybe this is 10 years. We don't know about this virus. We don't know about anything." Everything was so unknown that my anxiety, in the first month, peaked really high. I couldn't understand our reality. I was a DJ, and they were asking me to play music, but not for dancing. Everything was so confusing to me that I used this overwhelming music to chill my nerves—because I couldn't create club music, either. I couldn't find an inspiration or future for club music. I was like, "Okay, I'm doing club music, but for what purpose? For what space?" Out of this idea, I thought, "What if I create music for these empty spaces that are not real?" Because what's the point of having a stadium if it's empty? What's the point of clubs if people can't go there? We build something around our activities, but when these activities are suspended, what are the points of these places?

I was really exhausted by this concept of chill music that's just for relaxing, with no more intention than to be a soundtrack that you don't have to think too much about. I wanted ambient music that needs your full attention and brings everything to the extreme—no kick drums, no percussion, but super overwhelming, a lot of notes, almost with an intention of virtuosity, which, I hate virtuosity so much. But I felt like I needed to do something so extreme to relax my mind. For two months, I was buried in these melodies and sequences, and it almost served as a medicine.

Yeah, this record's obviously very ecstatic-sounding, which I always love—but it's funny to hear you say, "This is stuff that relaxes me"—because it's stuff that would give other people a panic attack. too.
There is one track that almost gives me a heart attack. But what we all understand is that art, as you want it or not, isn't in a bubble outside of the worldwide situation. At the end, this album is a reflection of something super unusual in our lives, and it was borne out of a super unusual situation that I never experienced before. I was feeling a bit lost, and I was finding these sequences and ideas to hold to something—and when I found these ideas that I could build with this super-hyper melodic sensation, I was like, "Okay, this is the music. I need to bring all this euphoria that is nowhere, and it can be nowhere right now to my mind."

You know, I've talked to a fair amount of musicians at this point who have been like, "COVID was actually pretty good for me." But it sounds like it had a very profound effect on not only your thinking as an artist, but how you function as a human. Tell me more about what that experience was like for you.
It took me 20 years to call myself an artist. At first, I considered myself more like a professional—someone that does their work, and leaves. People are happy, they pay, and it's fine. But during COVID, I had to resign from my life for almost two years. Usually, people have to resign because they are ill or they have to take care of someone. Sometimes, you resign because you're tired of doing this work and you want to change. But this sudden, almost obligated resigning—just because of the wellbeing of others in this situation—it was almost to the point that doing something in terms of music felt almost criminal.

It was really intense and hard for some people. Some people, I suppose, enjoy being at home, and they create under those circumstances. I create under the circumstances where I go, I play out, I see friends, I feel energy, and then I come back and translate that to music. But when I got cut out of my normal life, my flux of information, energy, and inspiration got also cut. I haven't been able to write a club track in the last six years. So trauma is still there for sure. Every time I hear about a new virus, I completely panic, because I'm not sure if I'll be able to resist another pandemic.

I completely understand. It's always refreshing when I hear people talk about it this way, because there exists this very understandable desire to be like, "Whatever, it happened and we can move on." But it was intense!
It was intense. And also, Larry, I think we wanted so much to come back to normal that we never processed what happened in a good way. We just moved on. For me, I was alert—like, "This can happen again. You can be in this situation again." My relief in this world is not the same as before the pandemic. I'm always alert. Something changed after that.

A lot of friends, and my parents of my friends, died. A lot of people died in Spain. A lot of people died in the world. I was hearing that 16 million people died of COVID. This is insane, the amount of people that died—and we didn't process that in a personal way. It's crazy how a global situation affected me so much when it came to creation. I was really surprised.

Talk me through what you've observed in terms of post-pandemic Spain—musically and otherwise.
People moved on quite fast. As soon as everything reopened, we played so much, and there were so many cancellations and gigs to be postponed, that I got a bit exhausted after one year. I felt super drained, almost on the verge of depression. When I started re-composing the album for AD 93—because I only had six renders but almost 70 projects—I told [AD 93 founder Nic Tasker], "I can only open one project per week. It's going to take maybe 25 to 30 weeks to open all the projects and to go through them. Just to let you know, that's more than half of a year just to choose the tracks." Because every track reminded me that much level of intensity.

At the same time, as everyone was coming back to the same situation as before, a younger generation of listeners and participants in the club scene got in, but from a different perspective. They got in through Instagram, social networks, and an aesthetic idea of what is club culture—without experimenting with it, and through an almost super-incorporated idea of what is club culture. Always paid by a brand, in a super big party, from a perspective that's almost like a marketing strategy. Instagram had people so compartmented that it was really easy to sell them stuff through the music they were listening. I never experienced that people in techno had to dress in almost all black, with all these aesthetic rules—and when we came back, they were imposed as if that was the reality, when it was not.

For two years, the only relationship we had with music and events was through social network and streaming—paid by brands, and with no other interests than tagging people, trying to build a market, and finding their targets. I think this had an impact in the electronic scene, post-pandemic.

I would have to agree! What's your relationship to going out these days? How often do you find yourself at the club in a non-performing capacity?
This year I went to two festivals that I played, but I stayed the whole weekend. One was a Galician festival in Spain. I went there to see local DJs, and it was so refreshing. I enjoyed it so much, seeing people play with amazing tastes that I never heard before, people of 24 years old playing vinyl for the whole night with amazing selections and amazing vibes. I reconnected a lot with the local scene , which is great for me because I never experienced a completely local scene in Spain. There were people dedicated to techno and was people dedicated to house, but I never experienced a scene united into a more broad taste. That was the first time I experienced it, and I was really happy that it was happening. At ADE, I stayed to see some sets, because I needed the refreshment of being excited by new things. As an artist, as I told you, I realized you can't live in a bubble—it's almost impossible nowadays.

So many people are like, "This thing is completely different from what he did." Of course, it's completely different because the world was completely different. How can you make the same music with completely different inputs? For me, it's not possible. Everything I do is related to what I'm experiencing with my feelings and my relationships with others, but also on a global scale. Where is the world going towards? This is something that I have to showcase in my music, because it's a really important part of my creation. If I feel excited about younger generations, that can be an inspiring point.

You're doing a bit of a trance thing at points on this record, which had a small revival earlier in this decade, to many peoples' chagrin. Obviously, the trance revival stuff was very surface-level, whereas what you're doing is very different from what was going on there.
The trance sound palette is a bit of an accident. During the pandemic, I was trapped with an old computer that had a program that I used a lot to make music for advertisements and more commercial projects. I did a Louis Vuitton advertisement that already had these kinds of sounds—a sunglasses advertisement with a really famous actress and a Spanish director—and I proposed a re-adaptation of these kinds of sounds for the advertisement, using a plug-in that I was used to working with. I'd ordered a computer two weeks before the pandemic, and they told me it would take maybe six months to arrive.

So I was there with the old computer, and this VST allowed me to do really sharp and short sounds. That was really cool because if I used it in a clever way, it could give the impression of percussion in the notes, even though there was no percussion. I started working in these crazy melodies, experimenting a lot with sequencers that people were building through Ableton Max for Live. There were a lot of creators at that moment releasing sequencers based in different concepts—Euclidean, polyrhythmic. The ones I used the most were the ones that allowed me more variety in the programs and parameters. I could have different melodies running through different steps that weren't really colliding. I recorded many takes, and as I was editing and putting them together.

When I was doing the music, I was actually thinking more in orchestral music than in trance—these instruments with solos that leave and come back, or speak with each other. There's something in trance and orchestral music that has this intention of being a bit overwhelming. They try to overwhelm you with melodies and make you a bit emotional. That was the starting point of trying to bring this euphoric ambient to reality. I was also really obsessed with this video of Ravel's
"Bolero" where the director of the London Symphony Orchestra, instead of a baton, he directs the orchestra with a toothpick. I was really impressed with the amount of sensibility that an orchestra can have. They can play really low, and they end in the highest intensity level possible.

I always envy a bit about acoustic instruments, how you can bring them from the lowest point to the highest point. That doesn't happen in electronic instruments, because it's not about how you play it. You have to build the sound by yourself through automatizations, and as electronic music is always compressed, the dynamics are always lost. It's really hard to find composed electronic pieces that they are really low and really high, because you always try to bring the electronic instruments higher with compression and limitation—which I tried to avoid in this album.

Your profile was raised as an artist in the 2010s, which was an interesting time for music in general. Reflect on that experience for me and tell me what you think has changed since, too.
We were super naive in the 2010s. We didn't think of social networks or media as a corporate thing. We knew there were these media groups, but the relationship between press and music was quite interested in art and the music in itself. It wasn't about virality or who sells more tickets. We were interested in listening to new things and being surprised by new music in Pitchfork, FACT Magazine articles and videos, and XLR8R reviews. What we were seeking is new music. I wasn't interested in finding products. It was an interesting moment where a lot of artists were using electronic to do pop and pop to do electronic, while mixing in hip-hop references. People doing techno were referencing J Dilla and doing completely new music based on these inspirations. It was naive, surprising, and quite creative. Lately, people know the rules of how to become popular and start defining their career by using some strategies to become someone on the internet. That's when people start losing their interest—because they feel that labels and artists are using specific strategies without being responsible for their creations.

But I also felt really lucky, because it was a moment for me that I felt super unconfident in what I was doing. I saw other people that were way more prepared, and I felt super small regarding them. I was playing with the XX, and I was like, "How am I going to play with the XX if I never played in front of anyone?" Maybe that's not my spot, but I wanted to try it. Maybe it's a disaster—we won't do it again, it's fine, but let's see how it goes. I was not pursuing a career as the XX. I was just trying to challenge myself and my abilities to do something in that moment. Nowadays, I'm way more confident in what I'm trying to achieve, and the ways I achieve it. I learned a lot through all these years.

An important part nowadays that we lost that is honesty. A lot of people are buying followers to become somewhere, super fast. This is not a honest relation with your audience, your career, or your output. At some point, it's going to backfire to you and your career, because you built something that is not real—and at the end of the day, an artist has to go on stage and defend their projects. That's a really important part of your work—and if you're not confident about who you represent, who you defend, what values you support, and what music you want to perform, it's really hard to defend yourself without being a simple product that someone will forget soon.

I do feel like, as this decade has gone on, the people who have really endured are those who are being true to themselves. There's this instinct to assume that people are stupid, but people are a lot smarter than they're given credit for.
Also, people grow up, and the more they listen, the more they understand the artistic positions of each person. When James Blake came out, I was like, "Wow, this guy has everything in his mind." It was already there at 19 years old—but some people take 20 years to develop that, and it's fine. Everyone takes their own time to understand what kind of artist they are, and how to showcase it in front of people—and that's completely valid. You don't have to be a teenager to release a masterpiece. You can do it when you're 50, and it's gonna be a masterpiece. It doesn't mean you have failed if you haven't done it at your 20s. Everything takes time. There's sports people that spend their 20s being okay players, and then at 32 they become the best players in the world. They experience something that makes them understand who they are and what position they are in the world, and they can defend it. That's what it is about being an artist—understanding who you are in the world, what you want to pursue, and what you can defend onstage or as an artist releasing music.

Let's talk about Hivern as a label. Walk me through what the label operations are like these days.
The label was a way for me to give something back. I wanted to help people that wanted to put music out but were a bit confused about tracklists, or what to release. I became a really good A&R. "Let's get this designer," "Let's choose these tracks out of these 20." "You have four here that have a concept, so let's work towards that concept."

But, energetically, it drained me a lot. This year, as I was doing this project, I couldn't do almost anything for the label except preparing two reissues—one from an artist from the '80s that died recently in Spain. It's a massive project costing almost 10,000 Euros to remaster and remix everything. I had to meet their family. These projects are really interesting, but it took five years to find the correct people to get the contracts written down. The label is really related to my energy, which is sometimes sad, because I'd like to keep continuing. But I realized that I don't want to leave this to someone just because it needs to be released. I enjoy doing the label work. So if, one year, I need to stop a bit more, it's okay—because if, the next year, we prepare five releases and they're nice, I'll be happy if I can be part of them. That's why I have the label—not to make money, just to enjoy having the label.

There's a lot of output that doesn't have any sense in this world. So everything I want to put out, or at least everything I want to leave behind, needs to have a purpose and some sense. A lot of people ask me, "Why are you doing so many side projects? What's the plan?" Sometimes I tell them, "There is no plan." I just need to release this because I feel I need to do it. There's no plan of re-contextualizing myself or selling you some bullshit. This is real stuff that I've been doing, and I need to put it out because I need to close this cycle of my life—and this project is part of that. It's a vital necessity.

I tell my manager, "Hey, I'm going to do this," and they come after me like, "Okay, how can we help you? What do you need?" They don't direct my career. I try to direct my career based on my musical output. That's how it has to be, because a lot of people are so focused on monetizing their career that they forget about enjoying experimentation outside their artistic personalities. If we kill that, there is no art. We have to encourage people to do side projects, even if we don't like it. It's good that people take the time and the risk to go outside their safe box, because that's how interesting, generous, new musical perspectives come. If we stay in the same box all the time, we're just like doing the same stuff all the time.

You mentioned doing the Louis Vuitton ad before. Let's talk about making a living as an artist.
Well, I'm lucky enough to have a career as a DJ. Since I released fin, I've been trying to separate my projects from my DJ sets. My DJ sets are themselves a project. Sometimes, people will say, "DJing is so easy"—and maybe for a lot of people it is. But for me, it's part of my culture, and it's a really important part of where I come from.

Many people have made the case that they couldn't make a living out of electronic music, so they do it for passion. Their only outcome is a record on this crazy label that there are 200 copies of. For me, putting these people in a set and being able to include all this music is really important. It's almost like a tribute to all these artists that never had the chance to have a career—and, for me, it's an important part of the club culture. Maybe someone will find a record from me 100 years from now and they'll never know that I had a career. We'll all be in the same position.

DJ'ing is a really important part of what I do, and it's a way to get inspiration to make other projects and other music. The energy you share in a room with the people—I didn't realize until the pandemic that it's so important for me. I was thinking, "What's the problem? Why can't I make music during the pandemic?" It was because I lost the complete connection with the energy I experience during the weekends—and that energy is super useful for me to make music during the week.

How old are you?
44.

Word. I'm almost 40, and when I go out to the club now compared to when I was younger, it definitely feels like the atmosphere and expectations have changed. What have you observed in that regard?
The positive thing for me is that there's a lot of older people that haven't resigned from the club experience. There is a generation that decided that this is our culture, and we have to fight for it—and if we have to share a club with 19-year-old kids, we're going to do it because it's our space too. Why do you have to resign from a culture because of your age? That doesn't make any sense if you see going out as a musical experience.

Events have also changed. There are way more events during the day, and they're great. It's not always in the nightclub that the best things happen. We had this idea that DJ sets could only happen in a club night until six in the morning. With COVID, we had to reinvent the events in so many ways, and there's been a lot of transformation that I appreciate.

What movies have you seen lately?
Yesterday, I showed Interview with the Vampire to a friend that's a bit younger than me. I think it has one of the most amazing casts ever. '90s movies, someone told me it was because the writers were on cocaine that every line of the scripts were perfect—and I kind of believe that. I studied screenwriting, and every time I analyze '90s movies, every piece of text is perfect. You don't need a single word more. Every character says what they need, and it's definitive. Sometimes, when I see movies, the dialogues is so lame because it feels real. Why do I have to see real people speaking in a movie? So I'm coming back to a lot of movies that were not that good in the '90s, but I appreciate the rhythm and tempo they have. I watched The Client the other day, and every part of the movie works like a clock.

I had a very similar experience watching The Firm recently, which also has an incredible score.
I love The Firm. With The Pelican Brief, it's a crazy plot about some Supreme Court judges that are killed, and I was like, "Wow, this is insane." I saw it as a kid and I understood half of it, but I think it's brilliant.

There is that "they don't make 'em like they used to" feeling.
At the least, it's good writing. I heard that screenwriters are being pressured by the studios, because people are on their phone while watching movies, to explain what actors are doing in the movie. So they have to write "I'm eating some mac and cheese" while the characters are eating mac and cheese. What's the point? And this is because people are not watching the screen while they are watching a movie, which is a crazy concept. There's a lot of people that have music on who don't listen to music—and this is happening now to movies, which is nonsense.

But people are definitely showing signs that they're sick of being pandered to as well. I took One Battle After Another's box office success last year as something of an encouraging sign in that regard.
Yeah, but I must say, for me, it's the least favorite movie of Paul Thomas Anderson's.

I didn't like it very much either.
I felt it was one of his worst movies.

I completely agree.
There was, like, one-third of the potential of Magnolia or There Will Be Blood. Where is the ambition? Paul Thomas Anderson, as soon as he got off drugs and an extreme life, he got a bit mild. You can see that in Licorice Pizza, and you can see that in this movie—and it's fine that people appreciate this part of him, but the good part is the extreme part that he once was. Phantom Thread is insane. I don't even know how to explain what it's about. I love that one.

Me too.
It's so dark, what that movie tells you, about people and how they behave to try to be safe, or to be in a place that they can't control. It's so dark that it's hard to explain.