“I guess it’s shadowy seen from an outside point of view,” says Mikel Acosta of Hegoa Diskak, an independent label repping the undervalued music of the Basque Country. ‘Shadowy’ was the term given to the scene by the London based experimental music writer Bradford Bailey, writing on the Sound Ohm website, but it stuck, and is now proudly quoted on the Hegoa Diskak Bandcamp page. “The history of the Basque Country is shadowy,” considers Acosta, who grew up in Irun on the Spanish-French border. “There’s elements of conflict, so there’s a lot of questions about what’s happened there, which take you to why some people are making this really harsh sounding music. There’s an anger, there’s something to be said.”
The semi-autonomous Euskadi region, which straddles the two countries, strove for political and cultural recognition throughout the brutal Franco dictatorship, and by the 1970s and 80s, punk and radical rock had taken hold across the region. Networks of DIY collectives and gaztetxes – semi-official squat venues – remain in place today, and underpin contemporary Basque music. While most underground music scenes put down roots in the urban spaces of the city, hotbeds of Basque independent culture are often found in local towns and left wing communities such as Azkoitia in Gipuzkoa and Bera in Navarre. The sheer unusualness of the Basque language – the oldest commonly spoken language in Europe, with no connections to those surrounding it, but one which is widely embraced by bands and artists – is another ingredient of the region’s extraordinary and enigmatic music.
Hegoa Diskak began in London in 2021 with a compilation of music by Angel Katarain, a sound engineer for the IZ label who had been creating his own synth pop experiments on the side. Since then, the label has championed lone experimentalists, ambitious auteurs and archival finds which are little known outside (or even inside) the Basque region. “I’ve learned more about my culture from outside, by separation,” says Acosta, who moved to London to make music, but is about to return to the Basque country to further his curatorial projects. “There have been different narratives that haven’t been told. And that’s what I’m interested in.” Each Hegoa release is pressed up in just a few hundred copies, but their projects often emerge after a long period of gestation, and like STROOM or Cortizona in Belgium, or Akuphone in France, it’s a European label whose releases carry the force of serious primary research.
Hegoa has just entered a new and notable phase of its operations. Acosta has returned to the Basque country with several collaborative and curatorial projects on the table, much of it cultural activity well under the radar of the English-speaking media. Alongside Xabier Erkizia, a researcher and film maker who has already completed a film about the Argentine electroacoustic explorer Beatriz Ferreyra, Hegoa plan to release archival work by Llorenç Barber, who composed for bells in the 1970s and 80s, as well as a major archival project exploring early compositions for magnetic tape by the celebrated 20th century sculptor Jorge Oteiza.
In recent years, many of Europe’s most fertile microscenes have emerged amid the smaller countries, independent regions, and lesser known languages – in Finland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia and elsewhere. Basque music is another instance of a smaller cultural group going its own way and punching above its weight.
Joseba Irazoki – Gitarra Onomatopeikoa II
Irazoki, who is based in Bera, is one of the most prolific guitarists in and around the Basque scene, whose work across solo fingerpicking, ramshackle rock, improvisation and ambient guitar meditations demonstrates a range approaching that of an Oren Ambarchi or Jim O’Rourke. Irazoki’s languorous and introspective guitar work uses chorus, delay and tremolo type effects which seem to gently stretch the space-time continuum, and creates a self-contained interior world with echoes of Loren Connors. Guests here include two further protean improviser-auteurs, Rhodri Davies and Raphael Roginski
