(..) Junto a propuestas de similar calado subterráneo como las de Ginferno, Margarita, Nisei, Akauzazte, Fasenuova, Billy Bao o Bèstia Ferida, los “putos ZA!” le permiten a uno mantener viva la esperanza en lo que todavía está por venir y entregarse al proselitismo con entusiasmo. Y eso, amigos, no lo paga el dinero. (..)

Sei Cafe Teatro seikote gipuzko-naparrak Foehn kataluniar diskoetxerako grabatzen duen bigarren lana da eta hirugarrena beraien ibilbidean. Lan borobila, anitza eta maisutasunez landuta, baina motza. Bai, motza egiten zait niri, gogoak gehiago eskatzen dit. Abestien planteamenduak, aurkezpen misteriotsu eta geldoak denbora eskatzen du erabat hausnartzeko, erabat blai uzteko.
Zurrunbilo leun batek estaltzen ditu pieza guztiak (10 guztira) bai elektronika, bai akordeoi edota teklatua. Haren gainean gitarra akustiko, elektriko eta haize instrumentuez doinuak margotzen dituzte. Modu sakabanatu eta askeaz batzuetan, zehatzago bortitzago, tentsio edota erritmo indartsuagoz beste batzuetan. Dotoretasunez beti, sentsualitate oroitarazte batez jantzirik. Jazzaren gau-klub hiritar giroari, folkaren epeltasuna, lurrerako atxikipena kontrajartzen zaio, hondartzan izarren azpian bukatzen den gau horietako batean bezala. Gitarra eta tronpeta haserrealdi tentso eta aske bat edo besteari elektronika eta kanpo grabaketen alfonbra biguna eskaintzen zaio. Alde batetik giro edo ambient musika dela esan daiteke, baina ambient musika hoberenak eta interesgarrienak ohi duen bezala ez du erabat atentzioa musikatik aldentzen uzten, beti dago aurkitzeko eta dastatzeko oparitxoren bat eta denboraren poderioz pixkanaka doinuak bere muina azaltzen joaten dira.
Bere edertasunaz jabetzen zarenerako eta leporaino murgilduta sentitzen zaren unerako bukatu egiten da diskoa. Lelo moduan CD ekipoari edo ordenadoreari begira sinistu ezinik gehiagoren eske gelditzen zara. Horregatik diot motz egin zaidala, plazereko unerik gozoenean eskutatik alde egin baitit. Baina, beharbada, hala behar du izan hurrengo disko baterako, hurrengo kontzerturako gosea piztu eta areagotzeko. Ez gehiegi itxaron mesedez!

Hay rarezas. Autores, estilos y grupos que deambulan. Que se resguardan entre la maleza. En los bosques húmedos e infranqueables. Ráfagas, propuestas que devastan desde la periferia, desde la oscuridad de las pupilas tornadas. Desde la esencia de la coraza, donde no llegan los rayos de sol, ni las brillantinas de la vida moderna, demodé. Rara avis que asume riesgos, monstruo incomprendido de belleza inhóspita, sonido de las tinieblas, turbias, eléctricas, eclécticas. Con este nuevo trabajo el grupo Akauzazte abre nuevas sendas, nuevas bifurcaciones dentro de la experimentación post.

Hipnosis tribal. Soga que te zarandea. Cuchillo que corta hilo fino. Sonido punzante en nuestra memoria étnica. Loops. Hoguera musical. Fiera que escuece. Calcina. La misma que ha dibujado el componente del grupo Roge Astigarraga para la cubierta del disco. Rueda temporal que gira, se tuerce. Exprime. Pasos, piedras, libélula. Destrucción, aniquilación.

Akauzazte (Azkoitia, Guipúzcoa, 1992), grupo ligado al Matadero de su ciudad, tiene una propuesta que ha estado ligada a la autogestión y autopromoción. Recientemente han publicado un nuevo disco y, como de costumbre, hay que destacar el formato artístico trabajado, serigrafiado y artesanal: digipack negro, pulcro. De hecho, además del disco, nos deleitan con un DVD producido por Ángel Katarain (productor habitual de Jabier Muguruza, La Buena Vida, Ruper Ordorika, Negu Gorriak, etc.), reverso moldeado.

El sonido, limpio del golpe de la madera en la madera. La txalaparta, (instrumento de percusión tradicional vasco) y las campanas del pueblo de Andosilla son el vaticinio de la densidad de las guitarras en el comienzo de “Hau beste norbaitek abesteko egiña izan zen“, (”Esto estuvo hecho para que cantara otro“), primera de las once canciones del nuevo trabajo de unos de los grupos musicales más difíciles de clasificar.

Ritual espiritual, onírico, y envolvente que homenajea al gran antropólogo vasco Joxemiel Barandiarán. Conjuro para la conversión en bruja, mientras se balbucea “Por la se, Zalpate, Funte fa, Funte fi, Txiri, biri, ekatsu, ekatsu, amen” mientras se santigua con el pie. Apisonadora ambiental, creencias, vestigios de un tiempo y de un lugar. Interferencias de una radio, repetición, reiteración, off.

El componente del teclado y los sonidos electrónicos han adquirido más presencia en este trabajo pulcro, denso: Itzali motorrak (Apagad los motores) apacigua desde la instrumentalización, un interludio sosegado para bailar entre brujas: Sorgiñen dantza. Alaridos, irrintzis, pócimas, hilo fino que enlaza la causística del sonido ambient, naturalista, evocador, que catapulta el sudor de la cuevas, el pulso de los ancestros, salvajes. El paso de un gigante, mientras, como si de una marcha organizada se tratara, la rabia se concentra en la letra de Gure etxean gaude (Estamos en nuestra casa). Tiran de viejos dichos, en Ezari emanak (Lo dado a la negación): “La negación se lleva aquello que se niega/reconoce“.

Búsqueda, indagación en las variantes antropológicas de la música y sus raíces. La cosmogonía del pueblo Mande de la África occidental en Bat (2) se funde con el directo del grupo. Invocación carnívora: “El ser uno se dotó de dos ojos./Los cerró: engendró la noche. Los abrió: nació el día./La noche se encarnó en la Luna. El día se encarnó en el Sol./El sol se casó con la Luna“. Ellos engendraron el tiempo temporal divino. Para Badaude han escogido versos de la poeta Amaia Iturbide (Bilbao, 1961): “Hay claras imágenes de ángeles/que luchan porque la cadena del invierno aligere/en los silencios” (traducción al castellano de Iñaki Segurola). No es la única ráfaga de poesía del disco, que rezuma por todos los costados: rescatan versos del libro Isturitze-tik tolosan barru (1969) de Joxanton Artze para Nere amari.

Bajo el título de Akauzazte Danok, recogen once canciones grabadas entre los años 2002 y 2008, y con colaboradores de lujo: Tzesne, Xabier Erkizia, y Angel Katarain sellan sus huellas digitales. Recomiendan subir el volumen. No sentir miedo. Viajar en el tiempo, y en el espacio.

Billy Bao shot to micro-stardom wit’ a bullet last year on the strength of a stunningly powerful guitar-freakout 7” whose enormous sound was only slightly mitigated by the virtual impossibility of tracking a copy down. Well, here comes an appropriately apologetic deluge of what we
used to call in The Industry “sonic fuckery.” The mysterious conglomerate that revolves around Mr. Mattin (no first names please) has
managed to hit all the marks, and not just on the level of mere vinyl format (well, no 6” flexi releases … yet), while simultaneously functioning on three almost totally distinct stylistic planes. In order, from small to big: The 7” sounds like the EP that Harry Pussy never released on the Bad Vugum label. It’s 10 short bursts of squall and
screaming that functions as the true successor to all those early 80s hardcore EPs that packed a similar number of songs onto a single platter; and it plays at 45 rpm! Apparently the theme of the record is reflected in the title, in that the songs are supposed to pile up the
phlegm and sturm as the thing plays through but I have to say that until I was told this it didn’t really register. Anyhow, it’s really fresh and doesn’t get old fast, unlike “real” hardcore, soooo, next we have the 10” and here is something else entirely. Honestly. BB sits down in a
candle-lined, eggcrate-shrouded studio cave and just jams out two sidelong modern stoner-metal-jamz that echo no band that I am currently familiar with. I find myself glancing back over to my older Earth titles, hell, their first couple of obscuro EPs, to find a similar touchstone. I admit, I’m not up on indie metal moderne, but this No Wave metal of Billy Bao’s is enough to make me think twice about my reflexive boycott of Boris and Sun 0)))– maybe I am missing something. If Greg Ginn had heard this in 1984, we’d have yet another o/p SST product to
vainly scour the understock for, but this is available in the actual here and now. And, upon closer listen, the title of the damn thing starts to resonate, I think they are slowly combining and re-forming two songs at the same time on this. Clever apes. Now I feel like I failed a math quiz the first time a round, and now I’m going back over my
scribblings and spotting my errors in the polynomials. What-ev-er, the concept is not as fascinating as the stuttering sonics anyhow, gimmie another beer and fuck Mr. Whitaker-Connolly and his fucking geometry
proofs. Finally, their LP, of which the only truly negative thing I can weakly conjure is that the title is kinda dum. On this record, Billy Bao takes the No Wave that dominates the 7” and infects the 10”, along with
the metallic churn and the dead-lunged vocals, and adds another dimension: They’re actually a noise band. A couple of tracks on this have “imperfections” built into them, “skips” and harsh static and wot not, that had me out of my stuporous languor and over to the rec player
in no time … fuckers. That’s way more upsetting than Whitehouse instructing me to rape the next door neighbor’s 10-year old daughter (purely conceptual critical trick there, since no actual children seem
to live in my neighborhood). But when Billy Bao isn’t making me blow nonexistent fluff off my needle, they’re swamping my stereo with a sickly twenty-generations-removed blues vomit that recalls nothing so
much as a Civil War-era hospital orderly absently humming to himself as he gathers up hundreds of severed limbs for disposal. It’s violently dissociative in the most life-affirming way, and the only rough
comparisons I can honestly make to are the much-missed Scando gorillas, Brainbombs. All in all, these three releases are the early contenders to
make 2008 the Year of Billy Bao. —RW

Mattin is a name I’d heard of over the past few years which never made much of an impression and it was only after I read the interview with him The Wire that I thought ‘d seek some of his stuff out. Surprisingly, my local rip-off indie store had this little nugget sitting all but itself for supercheap money. I was expecting something a little stranger than the art/noise punk that Mattin’s band churn out here. I was kind of expecting something a little more Mouthus like, given the number of paragraphs written about his love of improv and AMM. This is sub-Stooges garage punk for the art set with some nice noise underground bits and it really works for me in ways I wasn’t expecting. Sacrilege is actually a compilation of the vinyl releases that Billy Bao put out in 2007. It contains the Accumulation 7 inch, Fuck Separation 10 inch and the Dialectics of Shit LP. Hats off to Scotti from Missing Link whose Afterburn label has again rescued some never heard obscurities from oblivion. The packaging is great and the booklet is a cracker. Just don’t get sucked into the label description – they almost make this sound like something between Whitehouse and Cherry Point. It’s not – it’s better. Lord I enjoyed this and if you like the clip below go throw Scotti some of your cash over here.

Mattin could probably write a very nice song if he chose to, but it’s probably better for everyone that he doesn’t. Instead he makes up stuff and records it straight into his Thinkpad T42 laptop, using its constricted internal microphone to pick up his singing, along with some guitars and a couple of people down the hall shouting and playing sax together in the toilet. Mattin really makes you not want to care. He takes things serisously so you don’t have to. ” I know you cannot survive any of my desires,” he intones at one particularly intense moment in the session, which took place somewhere in Tokyo last summer. He doesn’t have to tell you twice.

Punk salvaje y destroyer de la mano de Mattin, Xabier Erkizia, y Alberto lópez a la batería, 10 cortes de 1 minuto con energía, caos, intensidad y jodida mala hostia ,que se van acumulando creciendo y pillando consistencia a medida que avanza el disco. Está editado por este nuevo sello Londinense , (sub sello de la Vida es un Mus) dedicado a editar trabajos mas experimentales dentro del punk.

El prolífico francotirador vasco MATTIN aparece
por partida doble en cuarto volumen de la serie improvisatoria <> (Azul Discográfica), y colaborando junto al saxofonista argentino Lucio Capece en NO MORE MUSIC AT THE SERVICE OF CAPITAL <> (Ideal).
En el primero, grabado en directo en Tokyo, aberra al frente de un cuarteto, horadando la paciencia de los contados espectadores con metronómicas esquizofrenias y escupitajos avant rock que precisan ser observados desde la distancia irónica, en contraposicion a esa faceta de cantautor provocateur

Bitterly cold again today. The snow held off, thankfully, but temperatures stayed well down below zero, so the snow remains but now packed down tight so that every surface feels like an icerink. I fell over three times today and I think I got off lightly at that. Tomorrow I go to work very very early indeed in the hope I can get away mid afternoon and make my way over to London for this concert. Whether I manage it, or perhaps more pertinently whether I get home again remains to be seen. I have just heard a few minutes ago that Sebastian Lexer will not now be playing, having been left stranded by the weather in Germany. I’m not sure just yet if his place will be taken by anyone else, but the concert is still going ahead, barring any further developments.

Tonight I have been listening to some really difficult music played by one of the musicians performing tomorrow. Although Jean-Luc Guionnet will presumably be playing sax tomorrow, this new album released by the Arteleku organisation (The same Basque outift that recently published the partly excellent Noise and Capitalism book) is named Gezurrezko joera and is another performance by Guionnet for church organ. Guionnet’s organ albums (I think this is the fourth solo, plus there has been at least one collaborative album) seem to really split audiences into two camps, those that find it intriguingly good, and those that really hate it. I personally sit in the former camp. Brian Olewnick managed to get around to briefly reviewing this album a few weeks back here, and he managed to get someone to translate the sleevenotes, which are entirely in Basque for him. The title of the album seems to translate as Non-Organic Bias, which is also the title of his last organ album, which I wrote about here and here. According to Brian’s seemingly reliable translation, the music is performed on a smaller electric church organ, which came as a surprise to Guionnet, as he was expecting a larger, more traditional instrument when he arrived at the church in Bera to perform the live concert captured here. Certainly, even though only a smaller organ is used there is still a very big sound to be heard here, partly because the church itself acts as a huge resonating vessel, letting each burst of organ slowly decay around the probably vast room.

I describe Guionnet’s organ music as difficult, simply because it is generally quite fractured and unlike what we normally expect when we hear the unmistakeable sound of such an instrument. On this disc, which lasts just about three quarters of an hour the music mostly consists of little stabs and disconnected threads of sound, spaced apart by little silences. The usual harmonic approach to the instrument is ignored completely, and the approach often taken by avant garde musicians tackling the organ, using it to generate dense drones is also sidestepped. The actual sounds we hear are partly instantly recognisable as organ sounds, and partly dissonant noise, though exactly how these are generated I am not sure. It is the way they are arranged though, in a nervous, stuttering, disconnected manner that gives the music its shape and somewhat hard to grasp form. There seems to be no overriding compositional structure to the piece, and as an attentive listener you are left hanging on each little fragment of sound, awaiting the enxt, which might come a second later, but may be delayed further, trying to make sense of it all.

Part of the difficulty of the music comes from the massive weight of history bearing down upon Guionnet’s instrument here. Even when I try and switch off all expectations and ignore what I have heard before of organs it is hard to hear these sounds played in such an abstract manner and not see them as disjointed and awkward, simply because of what I am used to. The angular, deconstructed form of the music does not sound right in the church space, and that warm, resonant sound doe snot seem to fit the music it has been applied to. Clearly this is just the human being’s natural tendencies to relate certain sounds to certain musical forms kicking in, but Guionnet seems to use this to unsettle us that little bit more, create something that sounds and feels awkward, uncomfortable and almost broken in nature.

Occasionally the sounds drop away to distant whispers, sometimes they slip into short droney moments, but still with jagged edges, but overall the sensation is one of sharp, dislocated passages that are hard to piece together into a whole. The listening experience is a bit like trying to put the pieces back together from a smashed vase. At first it feels like it should all come together easily but once you start to decipher it all it gets progressively more difficult. This is where I found a lot of pleasure in the album though. trying to ignore the weight of history bearing down on the sounds here, and instead trying to just take the music as a series of building blocks placed beside each other is a very tough, but equally rewarding experience. There is no easy listening to be had here, there is no way you can just leave this one to run in the background and expect to get anything from it other than mild aggravation, but engaging with this somewhat foreign language and trying to find meaning in it is a rewarding experience. I enjoyed Gezurrezko joera a lot, but I bet not many others will.

Say hi if you are at the concert tomorrow.

From what I can gather (thanks, Jacques!) the Basque title translates roughly to “Non-Organic Bias”. My initial attempt rendered something on the order of “On the Wrong Path”, which I kind of like better. What apparently transpired here is that Guionnet went to the church in Bera expecting to encounter a standard church organ, instead finding himself confronted with a small electric one; it’s basic sound reminds me very much of those used in the original recording of Reich’s “Four Organs”. Perhaps all to the good as he constructs a fine, fractured recital, often balancing on the electric interstice between sound and the noise that results barely connecting contacts. It’s a serious, even meditative performance with something of a brooding nature, very strong. Guionnet makes references to “standard” church organ playing (enhanced by the room’s acoustics which allow for a long decay) but consistently undercuts them, steering them down lanes that lead to noise and disruption; but the historic tinge lingers. Good stuff, perhaps my favorite of those releases of his I’ve heard.

The title, translated from Basque, means “a tendency to lie”, a vague reference to the motivations behind this set, recorded at the Altzate Church of Bera (Nafarroa) during the 2008 edition of the ERTZ Other Music festival. Guionnet was supposed to perform a solo concert on the church organ but found a completely different situation waiting for him: instead of majestic lines of pipes spreading along the walls, he got a malfunctioning electric instrument and a PA. Making a virtue of necessity, he launched himself in an improvisation that exploited everything that wasn’t working, and then some. At first, we’re welcomed by seemingly interminable silence, broken only by the outside traffic noise (”oh no, here we go again” my initial reaction in anticipation of the umpteenth helping of reductionist imbecility), but then Guionnet starts kicking the beast quite effectively, producing a series of crusty noises and incoherent hammered changes - imagine trying to listen to Radio Vaticana in a sandstorm. When the derelict “organ” accepts that Guionnet is indeed the man to bring it back to life, the fun really begins. Earthquake-like vibrations in the low register stretched together with high-pitched codes get jumbled in massive superimpositions of disfigured harmonic stasis, ultimately collapsing into stylistic degeneration. Stabbing fixity and threatening emphasis overwhelm a quiet audience. Anyone remember Thomas Demenga and Heinz Reber’s Cellorganics? Guionnet lands (involuntarily) in similar territory, the resulting music perhaps a little more dramatic, stripped bare without rounded corners or concessions to easiness. The warm applause saluting him at the conclusion is unquestionably deserved.–MR