Like a gem beyond the border, Holiday/Day-‘s first album surprises with an elaborate and non-artificial intimate Basque folk, which crosses experimental styles and formal foundations, delivering a coherent, emotional and detailed full-length thanks to Jon Agirrezabalaga’s production. After many years of self-knowledge and instrument (guitar) training, Aitor Martínez Merino from Zaragoza recorded almost in secret at the El Tigre studios. The album is simple but complex, it has lights and shadows, it’s hot and cold, and in itself it’s a long and rounded work, which can’t be divided into singles and deserves a long and leisurely listening, preferably on the 12 inch released by Humo, of course.
From the beginning, the album is dominated by contemporary tunes. The bare “Acapella” is graced by a simple percussion full of effects, continuing with the right hand and guitar display of “Again”. After the simple rumba “Alhacaba”, in the ambient and experimental “Armonikos”, Martinez brings evocative echoes and tremolos to deliver the huge poetic lyrics and rounded song of “Alkitran”, decorated with splashes of electronics (and even autotune) where necessary. Case, there are long songs. Because that doesn’t make sense here. Leaving room for experimentation, the whole album puts you in a certain aura and atmosphere, Agirrezabalaga’s production helps to achieve the latter, as well as the careful dynamics of the playing. When we are used to listening to digital instruments, it is not out of place to remember that strings have different intensities (and there, harmonics!).
The experimentation is also not anecdotal or used in a sterile way: the effects are pushed to the point of excitement, extending the tracks and leaving room for feedback, modulation, filters and electronic noise play a leading role, they are not included in a disguised way, but with full intention and meaning, without fear. This is how pieces that seem simple at first listen are transformed. “Like a Diabetes” begins as a relaxed semi-bossa, ending with Raster Noton-esque minimalist microtronica, full of granulation. The poetics of the work continues to be everyday and close in “Bost tetera”, far from ambitious, like the philosophical and everyday anecdote he tells in “Kaletik”. Finally, the simple haiku “Ta hala ere”, perhaps the most rhythmic of the album, but at the same time atmospheric and introspective. Flamenco? A singer-songwriter? Experimental? Dark? It doesn’t matter, you have to listen to this album because it will blow your mind.
Festival/Day of the Lights Riot