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Written in fRoots issue 361, July 2013

BUDIÑO
Sotaque
Fol Música 100FOL1068 (2013)

Galician bagpiper Xosé Manuel Budiño is still the excellent player I first met a couple of decades ago, just before he played a dazzler to win what I think was his first major gaita competition. His 1997 first album, Paralaia, is a melodious gem (and features one of the first appearances on CD by Mercedes Peón). He’s gone on to create the sort of big live, foot-on-monitors spectacle that during 'el boom' hoisted gaita music and individual gaiteiros from the streets to Galicia’s big outdoor stages.
     As in most of his albums, the tunes on the latest, Sotaque, are nearly all Budiño’s own, and there’s no doubting his undiminished musical sincerity, adventurousness and engagement with his tradition and search for new paths for it. But he seems infatuated with the possibilities of the multitrack studio and programming. Listening to this album my mental picture is primarily of two or three guys at a big mixing desk, working late into the night in a windowless control room layering sounds, painstakingly tweaking details, and then compressing and limiting it to a flat-topped block of a wave-form so that nothing jumps out.
     He’s joined by a small team, mainly Alfonso Merino on violin and frets and Carlos Castro and Chisco on pandeiretas and other traditional percussion. There’s a guest appearance by Michael McGoldrick on the title track, and film-trailer type weighty speaking of poetic lyrics by a guest on track 2 (too early for that sort of thing, if it has to be there at all). Chai Indiano shows strong Indian influence; the closer, Bica Na Baiúca opens with a chopped-up sample from a Lomax Galician recording. The most refreshing contrast comes with the robust male vocals and thump-rattling pandeiretas of Cantareiros do o Fiadeiro, with Budiño joining on gaita, in the unadorned traditional songs that make up the track Riamonte, but even that is so compressed it doesn’t leap out as it could.
     I yearn for him to make the bold, stripped-back, gutsy, wide-dynamics album, not necessarily forsaking the technology but using it to intensify the rawness. I know he can do it.

www.folmusica.com


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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