Excellent guitar improv album is Lepok (URPA I MUSSELL UiM 007), played by Joseba Agirrezabalaga and Mikel Vega.
Both players come to us from the Basque region, home to much great underground and improvised noise which the label is keen for us to apprehend. They note two performance “hubs” – Larraskito in Bilbao (now closed) and Matadeixe / Matadero in Azkoitia, and both our axe-slinging heroes have been active in these regions. For evidence of more performing skills by Mikel Vega, seek ye out the bands/projects Conteiner, Killerkume, Loan, and Orbain Unit; for Agirrezabalaga, the roster includes Autoa (whose 2002 album was a Julian Cope album of the month selection), Fernalia (With Sokrates Garcia), and his Paezur alias. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard enough music by these twirling dynamite-dans, although we did review the Killerkume album in 2018 (spoiler alert: it’s fab!) and Orbain Unit in 2022 and a solo cassette by Vega Powndak Improv…but we’ve been missing out on the work of Joseba Agirrezabalaga all these years.
Oddly enough although both these Basque roarers knew each other and fostered mutual respect and fan clubs, it seems this Lepok record is the first time they played together. The recording situation – it was made in a studio in Arrasate in 2021 – was apparently a hotbed of tension and mistrust, raw paranoia and angst seeping out in between takes…I won’t say these fellows were about to pull daggers on each other (they leave all that to their courtiers and footmen), but the already-strained politics of the region were instantly put under additional stress, necessitating an intervention from the mayor of Arrasate-Mondragón and his inner chamber. If you can imagine it, this session would be on a par with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker playing together after 1986, the date when the ironically-named Compatibles LP was unleashed. Both our Basque boys added effects to their guitars, the same way a true Spaniard adds garlic prawns to every meal (including breakfast) with net result that we hear a species of experimental improv-rockabilly with a dash of 1960s garage-band mayhem on the side, fed through Keith Rowe’s blender and layed for 12 hours on Fred Frith’s formica table-top.
And I haven’t even mentioned the presentation of the vinyl record, with its original charcoal artwork on the cover, an obi strip, letterpress for the credits, and a risograph sticker…and it plays at 45 RPM too! Could life possibly get any better? Well, check out some other releases on this marginal Catalan label (whose name translates as “snout and claw”), for instance the very jolly Mr. Wollogallu album, a collaboration between Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro originally released in Portugal in 1991…in the meantime try and hear this primo example of razor-slash acid-attack improv as frequently as possible. From 3 October 2023.