John Talabot: all in good time
“Everything I do is about documenting something,” says John Talabot over a video call from his home in Barcelona, perched in front of a floor-to-ceiling shelving unit filled with records. “Most of my albums are tiny moments of creation that I have between tours, or a project with a friend… The music is always related to some personal moments.”
Like a diarist or photographer, the Catalan DJ and electronic artist born Oriol Riverola chronicles life through the music he makes and plays, and he’s amassed a fairly vast catalogue over the years: ‘Sunshine’, his breakout single from 2009, and ‘ƒIN’, his 2012 debut LP for Permanent Vacation, made a splash with their blend of spacey disco, slow motion house and indie electronica; collaborative projects with with the likes of Swedish producer Axel Boman (as Talaboman) and Pional (as Lost Scripts) have borne steady crops of cosmic club fruit; to his esteemed Hivern Discs label, he’s contributed cuts of psychedelic techno, acid kosmische and chuggy, Balearic-leaning beats among releases from friends and peers. A taste for deep textures, alien melodies, crunching basslines and organic percussion pervades his sonic scrapbook; no matter what shape his creations take, his hallmarks are hard to miss.
Talabot’s recorded mixes have explored similarly personal themes and headspaces; his freestyle mixtape as DJ Bonclient, released in 2020 in celebration of Barcelona record store Discos Paradiso’s tenth birthday, was an unexpected gem. There’s nothing better than the real thing though, and he’s been playing out to plenty of packed dancefloors lately. When we speak on a bright Friday morning at the end of March, he’s settling into a rare two weeks off touring, having just finished a month-long residency at London club Phonox, interspersed with dates in Glasgow, Gent and Bogatá. After this break, he’ll hit the road again for a string of shows around Asia.
He’s grateful for his busy post-Covid calendar for many reasons, not least the boost it’s brought back to his creative life. “I was losing connection with people: the body-to-body thing that gives me the energy to make music,” he remembers of lockdown. “When I come home from a festival or a club, or when I see a concert and I’m surrounded by people dancing, that energy is what feeds me to create… It was two years without this. I was living out of memories.”
Though a lot of the music he wrote in and before 2020 has been scrapped – “The world changed, and I changed. There is stuff that I don’t feel so attached to anymore” – there have been some jewels salvaged from the rubble. One of the final projects he worked on pre-pandemic was ‘La Casa del Volcán’, which was released in November 2020 under the Koraal alias via Nous’klaer Audio. The nine-track concept album was written and recorded over the course of three nights in November 2019 during a trip to Lanzarote; its rumbling drums, resonant chimes and billowing atmospherics a direct response to the island’s rugged, almost otherworldly landscape. Photographs he took during the trip adorn the cover and inner sleeves, adding to its journal-esque quality.
