“We are the collective of shared solitudes”

The Catalan Clara Peya elucidates limits between the intimate and the collective in a work that goes to the essence of the instrumental: “Nape” (Hidden Track Records, 26) rethinks the very meaning of listening, creation and care. All in an album with multiple voices, very attached to the melody. Decisions, silences and essential honesty.

We agree with Clara Peya that creating community is something slow. He says it as one who enunciates a law that does not depend on the will, but on time. There is no epic in the phrase, only a realization of urgency that settles as he speaks, while this calm conversation passes on the terrace of a random bar, on a day – tired and ordinary – of promotion for the release of his new album. “Nape” It is born from a need for reunion. Not as a concept, but as an attempt to build a shared space in which different visions can live without neutralizing each other. Music as a great place. “This album is based on the need to meet again in a context crossed by discouragement, the breaking of ties and the dehumanization of the other.” The phrase appears from the Catalan woman’s mouth as if, before it was said, it already belonged to her imagination. It is a starting point that he has been cooking for some time, his albums and live shows have always sought the collective and his activity outside of them as well (trip with La Flotilla, departure from Spotify…), but now the idea definitely runs through the entire album: opening up ways to get together among strangers, training an emotional muscle that seems eroded. Not from urgency, but from something more unstable: the insistence, day after day, to keep trying. A way of thinking about community not as an ideal, but as a practice. “We are the collective of shared loneliness… Are we alone? We are all the same!”

“I am very brave. It is very important. I am so afraid that I can only be brave”

The album is organized as a sum of presences: sixteen songs, sixteen performers. Niño de Elche, Rita Payés, Judit Neddermann, Xarim Aresté, Mar Pujol, Juan Quintero and Anna Andreu, among others. Not as associations in a decorative sense, but as displacements of the center. Each voice slightly modifies the location from which it is heard. The piano—an upright piano with a mute—supports the ensemble as a contained, almost domestic presence. Without excess layers or artifices, everything sounds close, fragile: the electronics do not distance the whole from minimal. Despite not being a breakthrough album, there is more space, yes. A maceration that has eliminated barriers. In “Corset” (23) there were –according to the composer– songs that accumulated up to sixty tracks. Not here. Here everything is more exposed, more direct. Less “plastic” holds.

At the end of the creation process, I had forty-seven songs. There are sixteen left. The selection does not respond to a criterion of effectiveness, but of construction of an unappealable, almost autonomous world: which experiences can exist within the album and which cannot. What is left inside when a work decides its own form? “I no longer want to put out fires, I want to be with what I’m doing, in the present. I can’t be involved in a thousand things, even if I want to”. The present, what it is and that’s it, appears as a challenge. It is something that almost all of us are in these days at short speed. Clara Peya He talks about that challenge also in music: listening as a practice that has been deformed. We used to sell out records in the car in the summer. Four or five albums that stayed there, with a beginning and an end. Today music seems fragmented, without a story. “If you listen to my songs singly they don’t make sense; the albums have an order.” Resignifying music as algorithms and reels do is perverse. It is a displacement of meaning. Listening loses its natural context and with it its depth.

The work, then, is not in producing outwards, but in undoing that movement: returning inwards. You have to look inside. “The great evil is that we don’t love ourselves, so how can we love others?” And from there, a complex relationship with continuous doing as a form of evasion. She, as I already pointed out, has stopped. As a limit: only in 2025 did he publish the soundtrack of “Wolfgang” and the disk “Soliloquia”. The gut has ended up making decisions that the head has not yet formulated. “It’s a smart thing my body does.”smiles.

The direct ones also change under that logic. “When you listen to a song a lot, it wears out. The live performance cannot be like the record. Our brain looks for circuits, and these must be refreshed”. And it is more difficult to change those circuits than to continue repeating them even when they no longer fully work and hurt us. Peya says it without dramatizing it, as an almost technical observation. Redo roads where something hurt. Going through it again knowing that it is not neutral, or trying not to think about it too much.

This album did not want to be collaborative originally, but it ends up being so for a reason that is neither aesthetic nor musical, but structural: talking about loneliness forces us to open it up. It disintegrates it. “Who would come home if they wanted a hug? Many more people than you think”. The question does not seek an answer because it is not posed as a question, but as recognition of a gap between what we imagine and what really happens when the door opens: “Clara, you are choosing to live life like this!”he exclaims. Brief silence. “I’m very brave. It’s very important. I’m so scared that I can only be brave.”