who are THE PINKER TONES?

the myspace tunes are dreck though :(

Here's part of the article:

August 6, 2006
Music
Catalan Musical Stew Keeps Barcelona Up All Night
By NINA ROBERTS
BARCELONA, Spain

IT was past 2 o’clock one recent morning when the electronica duo the Pinker Tones took the stage in Arbúcies, a town about an hour’s drive northeast of here. Wearing white-framed sunglasses, blazers and earphones, Mister Furia and Professor Manso, joined by a frequent guest, DJ Niño, stood behind tables laden with mixers, turntables, soundboards and a Theremin. As American-style funk boomed from the giant amplifiers onstage, a young woman tossed aside her bag and began to dance wildly. The band mixed in snippets of dub, Hawaiian twangs, scratching, jungle beats and a manipulated sample of a Robert Plant wail, bringing most of the crowd of 20-somethings, many with long overgrown mullets and delicate piercings, to their feet dancing. The music — and partying — went on nonstop until 4 — an early night by Spain’s summer music festival standards.

A few days earlier, at the band’s tiny workshop on the outskirts of Barcelona, crammed with guitars, computer monitors, art books and stacks of vinyl albums, Mister Furia summed up the group’s sensibility: “We have a certain tradition of the Catalan weirdness.”

The Pinker Tones’ eclecticism is typical of the bands in the music scene taking shape in Barcelona, a city famous for its Catalan nonconformity. What began a decade ago with street musicians drawing on the likes of flamenco, hip-hop, electronica, funk, rock, tango and Cuban jazz, has grown into an informal network of bands, clubs and festivals. Still largely an underground phenomenon, with little support from local radio and major record labels, it remains in the shadow of the bigger, more commercial music industry in Madrid, a point of pride for many of its idealistic partisans.

“What’s happening in Barcelona now is what was happening in New York in the 70’s with early punk and later with hip-hop: handmade posters, no pretension, energy, authenticity,” said Darek Mazzone, a D.J. at KEXP in Seattle who often features new music from Barcelona on his global-music show. “That was before public relations took over the music industry. In Barcelona the music is the driving force behind the scene.”

Josh Norek, a founder of the Latin Alternative Music Conference and vice president of the Pinker Tones’ United States label, Nacional Records, said: “Barcelona has been a thriving alternative scene, more so than any other city in Spain. It’s cosmopolitan, international and has many immigrants. I think you’ll continue to see even more hybrids, fusions, cross-genres, singing in four different languages.”

The Pinker Tones’ latest album, “The Million Colour Revolution,” which they recorded in their Pinkerland workshop and released on their own label, is an exuberant and eclectic collection, swinging from electro-soul to bossa-nova-esque to a Catalan-Hawaiian instrumental. Think of a soundtrack for a blaxploitation or James Bond movie with a score by both Kraftwerk and Henry Mancini.

The band came together four years ago when the two men wrote music for a television documentary. “When we met,” said Professor Manso, whose real name is Alex Llovet, “we wanted to feel free to do music we’d never done before and mix things that in the beginning you’d say, ‘How can you mix Cuban music with a Moog and a recorder?’ Let’s try.”

Mister Furia (Salvador Rey) added: “An indie rock band is supposed to do an album with 12 indie-pop rock tracks in one kind of style that you can produce in 10 days. That’s cool, but we’ve done that already.”

Mister Furia pointed to Catalonia’s Surrealist movement, spearheaded by Salvador Dalí, as a big influence on the group’s irreverence. Professor Manso told how his grandfather, an art book printer, was once made to wait two hours because Dalí refused to see him until the artist had obtained and applied the correct wax for styling his mustache.

The Pinker Tones’ iconoclasm is rooted in the region’s history of anarchy, labor movements and wealth, as well as the Catalan language, which sets it apart from much of the rest of Spain. That lighthearted disregard for convention is palpable everywhere, from the biomorphic buildings of Antoni Gaudí to the middle-aged man who recently walked down Las Ramblas, the city’s most famous street, wearing nothing but a knapsack and sandals."