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SUSO SÁIZ is the forefront of Spain’s experimental / electronic music
since the late 1970s and the most representative figure of Spain’s now
cult ambient scene. JUSTO BAGÜESTE, one of the most important Spanish
electronic musicians since the mid-90s. These two old friends join forces
on this exceptional album. The sublime electronic sounds generated
by Suso Saiz and his guitar are combined with Bagüeste's psychedelic
atmospheres (playing Sax, Mini Moog, Theremin...). A masterpiece of modern
cosmic and psychedelic ambient!
INDUCING THE PLEASURE DREAMS
In 1995 Justo Bagüeste released a
record called I.P.D. (his first album released on Geometrik. The album
claimed to induce the listener a pleasant dream, heading for the final
sprint towards that collective promise beyond the end of the millenium.
I.P.D. was some sort of Goldberg Variations for the turn of the century,
played on mini moogs, short-wave radios and analog synths. In 2016,
Bagüeste and Saiz (producer of the 1995 album) performed at Periferias
Festival in Huesca. They were to play a reinterpretation of the recording
they had made twenty years before. After them played Hans Joachim
Roedelius, outstanding member of a generation of German musicians in the
70’s who used electronic as a means to overcome an ominous past. That
evening was entitled Glided Harmonies. However, Bagüeste and Saiz didn’t
appear nostalgic nor revisionist: just a certain atmosphere and a few
innermost samples linked the concert to the 1995 recording. Firmly stuck
in that moment, they offered a session of sonic haze based on dialogue and
improvisation. The 40 minutes of music we are now examinating stem from
that haze. Like a vitalistic statement, a heartbeat and a human voice open
the first track Nóstos. We are inmediately plunged into a boundless sea of
textures and synthetic serpentines entitled Margen de Indefinición (Margin
of Vagueness). Undoubtely this is a dream in motion: maybe we are in a
cryogenic cabin, inside a spaceship, travelling bound to the year 2000
again. In the meantime, some rhythmic turbulences show up, they make us
dream of a Despertar (Awakening) between faraway saxophones, glided
guitars, reminiscences of Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. The final stretch
starts in tension, mired in an inner conflict Cerca de Algún Lugar (Close
to somewhere). After a shamanic-like voice, the session leads us to a
backwater of spacious ambient music with stitches of sax and guitar,
describing a trascendental Implosión (Implosion) ended with unrepentant
heartbeats again. This re-reading of I.P.D. is like an agile pirouette
against the inertia of time. It reminds us of how intimately electronic
music was related to spirituality since the beginning, and how that bond
seems to have diluted now that we live in the 21st century, in the factual
setting of so many utopian fantasies from the past. Bagüeste and Saiz
evoke the enthusiasm of the future pasts. They recall that promise of
plenitude through technology that never was. At the same time, they update
that promise before our ears, naturally and fully aware.
Javier
Aquilué |
