Now for some juicy noise from the Basque Country. The duo of Emankore have created Emon Plakton, a ferocious CDR produced by means of electronic devices and home-made monstrosities.
Judging by blurry photo of these loons in action, they also have a mixing desk and might be regarded as “table noise” junksters, if that term still has any currency. The team of Itziar Markiegi and Garazi Gorostiaga first started unleashing their hellish brew in 2018, at a music festival organised by Miguel A. García – who else – at the Larraskitu club in Bilbao. Since that fateful moment, they expanded their repertoire by adding drum machines (a quite prominent feature on today’s release), a move not unrelated to picking up some influences from their Pan Sonic record collection. Apart from one other self-released cassette, so far it seems our duo-wristband heroes haven’t set the world ablaze outside of their own regional turf, although there are certain locales in the “Euskal Herria” (the term used by proud locals for the Basque region) whose ears will never be the same after encountering the duo.
Today’s blaster Emon Plakton (HAZI ESPORAK! e02.23) contains two horror-freaks, of which the opening cut ‘Medusa Golosa’ is a splendid 18:08 mins of restless, scene-shifting inchoate gibberish, where the extremely abrasive and grotesque surfaces of electronic mayhem (betraying the García influence, for sure) are pummelled and pounded by rude, ugly, drumbeats. What I especially enjoy is how these beats do nothing to help the listener on their journey, nor do they lend any structure to the music – they’re simply laid on, like so many blows of the cudgel, to punish a hapless miscreant. The title, in my dictionary at least, translates to “The Greedy Jellyfish”, and what better epithet to describe the evil forces that are currently disrupting the world order. The label itself is run by Enrike Hurtado, who first made us aware of this enterprise in 2023 with a couple of OK-ish releases, but this one does much more to restore my faith in the thriving experimental noise emanating from this part of the world, which Hurtado describes as the Espora Collective.
With lovely splurgy artwork by Josefina Absoluta and Itziar Markiegi. (04/03/2024)