Seventh, dark and meandering installment of Iggy Pop’s favorite band from Ubeta, the genuine and unmistakable Guadalupe Plate. They return with the essences intact, adding nuances and very sharp pieces. From the inclusion of saxes for the first time, to bewitching melodic and chameleon-like 8-bit keyboards that mutate into underworld voices. All under the baptized “Coffin Study”, over low heat and with iron and chrome in vein.
Ouija on the table and a spellbinding new game that emerges from the shadows, meandering and placing us on the starting square… we roll the dice and meet with Peter of God y Carlos Jimena in their particular beyond, from where they tell us the ins and outs of Guadalupe Plate (23) and much more.
After the departure of Paco Luis and the album with Mike Edison, how have you faced the process of creating and recording these new thirteen songs, returning to the duo-boogie format of your beginnings?
Pedro: From then until now the process has not changed much. We get together and play with ideas that I bring or things that are improvised as we go along. The most notable difference with respect to the other records, has been having all the time and being able to record ourselves through a 4-track tascam.
Carlos: The experience of having Estudio Ataúd as an ally has been the best way to achieve a worked and peculiar sound, taking into account that it has been recorded, as Pedro has said, on a 4-track Tascam 246. It is a very satisfying process, being able to handle the sound from the moment the idea arrives until it is captured on a cassette tape. The embroidery and final auction in La Mina with Raúl.
Facing all this and also having the pleasure of returning to our origins as a duo, has been a icing on the cake that Satan has put in our Martini.
“Facing all this and also having the pleasure of returning to our origins as a duo, has been a icing on the cake that Satan has put in our Martini.”
Always with that unique stamp of surreal humor and enveloping darkness of series B, oozing popular Ubetense wisdom and rural aromas of emptied and deep Spain, halfway between hilarious and fantastic passages by José Luis Cuerda and the sharp aridity of Sara Mesa… What is the modus operandi like when creating the lyrics and filtering them through that Guadeloupean universe so characteristic of yours?
Pedro: Spontaneous and intuitive. Many of the letters are an armed robbery to other sites that call you or that you have already lived. They can come from anywhere, from a misheard phrase, to a falseta, a popular song… They emerge as a crush on these words. Other times it is simply to say what you want.
Pulling on that magical thread that takes us to another apocalyptic and fatal dimension, where snakes, the dead, rats, demons or black cats inhabit… What are the references that inspire this creative world of the band throughout your entire discography? What do you feed on artistically, what would you say are the influences that have helped you weave, consciously or unconsciously, your very personal nightmarish hell and dark stories?
Pedro: It comes from the taste for the same apocalyptic and fatal genre. I could mention HP Lovecraft, The Family of Pascual Duarte, Alan Moore, David Lynch, Ennio Morricone, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Frank Zappa, Link Wray, John Lee Hooker, La Paquera de Jerez, Twilight Zone, Atahualpa Yupanki, Cine de Barrio , Howlin Wolf, Skip James, El niño Miguel, Edgar Allan Poe, Bloodbowl, Jose Luis Cuerda, Broken Guitars, Night of the Living Dead, Captain Beefheart, Robert Crumb, Goya’s Black Paintings, The Tabajaras Indians, Mystery and paranormal phenomena, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, Murderers, prisoners and people of malvivir, the Tarot, things from the past…
And speaking of the past, what music/records were played at your parents’ house? What memories come to mind?
Pedro: Like that soon, in my case I remember the trips in a Renault 5 with a device that read some giant tapes that I have never seen again. We listened to the soundtrack of “The good, the bad and the ugly”. Los Relámpagos, Carlos Cano, Antonio Machín and Adamo. I also remember a cassette in the kitchen and a Leonard Cohen tape along with another 60s Music compilation, called “Those Wonderful Years”, which had the classic “Stand by Me” and “La Bamba”, I liked to listen to them before go to school in the afternoon. My mother’s mornings singing songs from Jurado and Pantoja, almost making up the lyrics. The trips in my grandfather’s car to the countryside listening to Juanito Valderrama. The song of the Malinois canaries that my father raised at that time…
Carlos: In my house, the purchase of a Sony brand hi-fi music chain was quite an event, my father had a large record collection to which my brother’s and sister’s were added, I arrived already when the CD burst. There you could find a complete collection of classical music, mixed with Mocedades and Barón Rojo, there was a lot of Spanish guateque music and Los Sabandeños. I remember waking up most Saturdays of my childhood with “Amor de hombre” by Mocedades, while my mother cleaned the house. My first purchase of a CD, pirated and it cost me a lot, was “We’re only in it for the money”, a CD that I melted without rest.
Focusing on the new work, let’s run through some songs, for starters, the one named after the meandering and mysterious game on the cover, “Ruina”, to the rhythm of a haunting waltz, with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins strolling “from the Mill to the Sacromonte”. How was this song born? What succession of catastrophic misfortunes happened that long night in Granada?
Pedro: He was born in Granada, one of those days when your body catches you a bit silly. A few beers at the El Molino bar, in Realejo, my neighborhood, without much pretension. Things began to get mixed up in a bad way until they ended up at a thousand in a cave in Sacromonte. As for the misfortunes, I prefer to save them for the summary.
“Keep in mind that there is a secret box in the game that only we know about, some letters in a box that mean a lot. Please God it’s kept secret for the sake of education and composure.”
What do you create first, the song or the game? Have you already tried it? Any recommendations for beginners?
Pedro: Game and song go hand in hand. It has been tested and we could only say that it is a real ruin. We would tell them to say a Hail and cross themselves before playing, because of what might happen…
Carlos: We must take into account that in the game there is a secret box that only we know about, some letters in a box that mean a lot. Please God it’s kept secret for the sake of politeness and composure.
From the air of the desert with an aftertaste of apocalypse and Anatolian sounds in the initial “Calima”, to the “Zapateado” that makes the entire holy field wake up, passing through that borderline sunset in which “El Cóndor passes”, until arriving to the penultimate and disturbing “Maleficio”, with a hypnotic melodica and sharp saxes included again. Tell me a little about how this poker of instrumentals is forged, which always have a fundamental weight in your work
Pedro: We really like the instrumental theme, it’s inevitable that something falls out. Normally, they come up on the fly, “la del cóndor” was one of the first songs my father taught me to play on the guitar. Both “Calima” and “Maleficio” are due in large part to our friend Matias Lamb, who participated in the 10-inch band playing the trombone for the song “Baby you drive me crazy” and whom we asked to add some melody to the bases. that we had created
Carlos: The truth is that it is the first time that we want this texture on our records, it has given meaning to the songs, “Calima” now would be unthinkable without the winds, and I say “Calima” because it is my favorite song, but it is applicable to the others, where the son of John Mayall has done his work.
“Stabat Mater” is simply tremendous as a composition, but if you see it in context, it can move you in a very profound way… apart from being a brotherhood anthem, it also has the virtue of sounding like a twilight western, perfect! “
Your voice, Perico, seems possessed in the terrifying “Tía Tragantía”, a morphine blues that has its roots in a popular Ubetense story, right? Just like that twilight closing, “Stabat mater”, a revisited hymn (with extra Guadeloupean darkness) from the brotherhood of La Soledad de Úbeda… Tell us, please, how they came about and the roots of these two songs
Peter: That’s right. They are songs that we have known since we were children, one that was used to scare us as children and the other is a very exciting march that we have been listening to for as long as we can remember and, in our opinion, one of the best pieces of Holy Week in Ubetense; sooner or later, it had to happen that we played it, since it has all the ingredients that we like.
Carlos: “Stabat Mater” is simply tremendous as a composition, but if you already see it in the context, it can move you in a very profound way… in addition to being a brotherhood anthem, it also has the virtue of sounding like a twilight western,! perfect!
The primal and galloping boogies (like “It never rains like it thunders” or those souls drawn with knives from “In my grave”), as well as those swampy crossroads in which you move like demons in the fire, where the Delta and the North Mississippi hill country blues (“To hell you go”), always beat, between wails and screams in your works… American roots that seem to grow among olive groves infested with bats… Tell us about this alchemy of the band in which you blend foreign folklore and your own, giving fruit to that defining sound that makes you unique.
Pedro: I couldn’t say how it happens, we just try to create the music that we would like to hear with the ingredients that we have and with the things that attract us.
Carlos: I have said it on many occasions, I think that the trick really is not to get rid of anything that you have inside since you start sucking music, everything is there, the old and the new, and it would be a tremendous mistake to deny it. your own roots to try to make roots music.
Finally, a handful of winning versions, filtered by your dark and unique DNA: from the already named “El condor pasa”, to that classic by Agapito Marazuela in which, to the rhythm of flamenco blues with arabesques and a border aftertaste, “La stork” enters headlong to form part of your fantastic and dark animal facility; without forgetting the howls of your and our beloved Howlin’ Wolf, to whom you make a tour of Ubetense bars in “There is nowhere to go”.
Pedro: I don’t know if they could be within the scope of winners, the same in their time or in the sewers. But if I could tell you that all of them are songs that are part of us.