The Pinker Tones

Mr. Furia explains that in Barcelona, an invitation to dinner before nine in the evening is considered early. This is in response to my question about Spain’s late-night club scene.

“Our daily clock,” he says, “is set forward.” Mr. Furia is somewhere near the Canadian border speaking on his cell phone. “So, if you have dinner at 10, and then coffee, you won’t be finished until around midnight.” He says that’s why many Barcelona nightclubs won’t even open their doors until around one in the morning. “They stay open until 5:30, but in other parts of Spain there are lots of clubs that stay open until 8 or 9 in the morning.” I ask if this is considered after-hours. “Yes,” he says, “but there are some clubs that stay open nonstop through the weekend.”

The music that Mr. Furia makes with Professor Manso is upbeat party music. Together they are the Pinker Tones, a Barcelona duo Furia (Salvador Rey) and Manso (Alex Llovet) have been called “electronic-Latin freaks from Barcelona.” Their sound is electronica interspersed with remixes and horny club thumpers sung in four or five different languages.

I remember a story from a while back about how Furia and Manso, both city boys, had built a new studio in the woods. They called it Pinkertown 2 and named the first album they produced there Wild Animals. When I ask about their influences, Mr. Furia invokes a German concept to explain that their music is more than their influences.

“It is a matter of weltanschauung,” he says. “What the Germans refer to as one’s way of looking at the world.” Mr. Furia also says that with the Pinker Tones he wanted out of the musical box that other bands had kept him in stylistically. “In the words of Duke Ellington, there’s only two kinds of music — good, and bad,” he paraphrases, “and the good comes from weltanschauung.”