Artist Bio:
The Pinker Tones: Poble Nou, Barcelona. A hot day in June, 2001. Mister Furia makes his way to the Stationers in Carrer Pamplona. An Impala pulls up and Professor Manso appears from under the helmet, what a surprise! They hadn't seen each other for three years and spent 15 minutes catching up.
The next day, they bump into each other on the corner of Carrer Llull and Carrer Pamplona. They exchange a quick hello, but Manso is in a hurry and has to rush off. On the third day, Mister Furia bumps into Professor Manso again, this time in front of his house with a group of musicians. It turns out that they live 100 meters from each other! Manso has a gig that evening, but before they part they have a quick chat about their respective musical projects. Hmmmmmm... they both think.
On the fourth day Mister Furia doesn't bump into Professor Manso but he gets a phone call asking if he is interested in producing a score for a TV series, Once Upon a Time in Europe. He calls Professor Manso and asks if he'd like to produce the score with him in the studio he has set up in his house. And so it was that Professor Manso's Mac and Mister Furia's Analog Synths were brought together for the first time, and that is how The Pinker Tones were founded.
The score is a success. During filming, The Pinker Tones meet Christopher Lee, who had been chosen to present the series. The meeting takes place in the Restaurante Amaya in La Rambla, Barcelona, and while they enjoy chipirones and gambas a la plancha, Christopher Lee, to everyone's amazement, expresses how much he likes the score and that his real artistic vocation is the bel canto. The Pinker Tones compliment his magnificent baritone voice, and his excellent taste in music.
From the beginning, The Pinker Tones realize their new project has fantastic potential, and that there is very positive energy during their recording sessions. They begin to compose and produce like crazy in what has now become their new home: Pinkerland. In this tiny rooftop studio in the centre of Barcelona, they begin to put together their first album, which is finally released in 2003, after two maxi-singles, "Mais Pourquoi?" and "One of Them." The album is called Pink Connection and is immediately chosen for the FNAC New Talent Award. Very soon, new possibilities appear on the horizon for The Pinker Tones, including exciting offers from foreign countries. However the record label doesn't share the band's international ambitions and they decide to join a UK label, Outstanding Records. As a result the album stops being available in Spain, but is released in more than 100 countries worldwide under a new name: The BCN Connection. Thanks to the fantastic videos for the singles "Mais Pourquoi?" and "Viva la Juventud," The Pinker Tones start to appear regularly on MTV and other channels around the world. The video for "Mais Pourquoi?" spends 19 weeks in the top 20 in MTV Spain's Dance Floor Chart.
While all this is going on, The Pinker Tones don't rest for a minute. They produce various albums and singles for Spanish and international bands (Bondage, ExMundus, Veldt, David Devant & His Spirit Wife), they compose a couple of film soundtracks (Sincopat and Survival Train), and they dedicate some of their time to experimenting with remixes (Skizoo, Carrots, Alessandroni, Ovni, Capri, Klaus Esser, etc). But their main project is the second album. They work on it for more than two years and create an album that is already surpassing all expectations. In Spain and the UK, The Million Colour Revolution is released on November 7, 2005, on Pinkerland Records, a label founded by the band itself, and Outstanding Records. Between now and February 2006, the album will be released in more than 40 countries, including Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, Japan, Korea, USA, Canada, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela.
Professor Manso and Mister Furia have also developed a live format, with the invaluable help of DJ Niño: The Pinker Tones DJ Crew, in which they combine the intensity of a rock band and the excitement of a DJ set. The bootlegs they create live are hugely popular. The DJ Crew has taken them from Poble Nou to far away places such as London, Caracas and Johannesburg.
Professor Manso: Born of an inventor father and accordion-player mother, the young Manso was always destined for the world of show-business. He says that when his mother was pregnant with him, her husband would place the accordion on her stomach. With the movement of her breathing, the instrument would expand and contract creating strange sounds best described as 12-tone music. His father had the strange notion that the fetus began to train its ear this way.
Later Manso began to have classical piano lessons with Svetlana, a Russian teacher. But the young Manso was more interested in dancing to popular Basque rhythms, or chasing the little ducks of Furita, or playing with his seven African hamsters…until one day, to the proud surprise of his parents, Manso decided to convert his small bedroom into a spectacular set of percussion instruments out of pots and pans from the kitchen, mop buckets and old junk found in a scrapyard. From that moment on the deafening noise that came out of his bedroom day and night led him to rapidly lose his reputation in the neighborhood as a nice boy, and left neighbors at the end of their tether.
This continued for many years until one day his father invented the first homemade computer in history (of which unfortunately no proof survived) with pieces taken from a Japanese television set and an old Olivetti typewriting machine. Just on seeing the device, the young Manso forgot about his promising future as a percussionist. He was hypnotized by the movements of the mouse and spent the next 20 years of his life hooked to it. The neighbors could finally breathe easy, at least for the moment, until he joins forces with Furia. And the rest, as they say, is history…
Mister Furia: From a tender young age, Mr Furia knew he was going to be a great music artist. His parents say proudly that the young Furia had a special gift for music, and that before he even learned to walk he could already play the sitar.
His first great passion was Tyrolean and Alphorn music, and the Zieh-Harmonika (an alpine diatonic accordion), but family pressure and personal motivation eventually led the young Furia towards more contemporary styles.
His next step was to move towards a style of music which, due to a complex and incomprehensible mental mechanism, reminded him of his beloved Tyrolean music: the bossa nova. Then he added Professor Manso to this Brazilian-alpine mix and their mutual growing interest in electronic music and the ukulele. And the rest is history. —Courtesy Calabash Music
