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Written in fRoots issue 310, 2009
 

GOSE
Gose II
Baga-Biga BBCD 16 (2007)

Jumping, by lucky opportunist chance, onto a courtesy bus, I found myself delivered to a club hired by the Basque government for an off-off-Womex event that turned out to be one of the two most impressive gigs I saw in Sevilla (the other, since you ask, other being Colombian llanero band Cimarrón).
     The band was techno-trikitixa trio Gose. Kitted out, instruments and all, totally in black and white, expertly lit in front of interesting images flashed on multiple video screens (a rarity to find projections so well integrated) with sound so meaty and perfectly wrought you could eat it, charismatic singer and triki (diatonic accordion) and panderoa player Ines Osinaga, guitarist Osoron wrenching power-fuzz out of a white Explorer and Iñaki Bengoa walloping a pair of drum-pads linked to his laptop programming, pumped out a glorious, sense-confusing set of joyful uncomplicated attractiveness, with plenty of enjoyable posing and audience communication on stage or with Ines leaving it to move among the crowd. How far triki-pop has come since the first explorations of Maixa ta Ixiar and Alaitz eta Maider in the 1990s
     I write as someone who normally hates the thud-tizz of club techno, and the lack of human communication in the performing of it. But just occasionally, when it’s that well done, the sound and staging spot on and the balance between live playing and programming just right, it does it for me.
     Of course, though the album (with, incidentally, Maixa ta Ixiar’s Maixa Lizarribar guesting) has the same material and would probably go well in a DJ dancefloor set, in the calm of my own living room it’s inevitably not the same experience. But I still find myself brightened and energised. And at home I have the opportunity to listen more carefully to whether triki and techno meet on equal terms, or whether the triki is simply a flavour. Well, they do, and it isn’t.
     A fine example of traditional music being re-injected into the mainstream, a genuine popular music. (As the band point out on their website, trikitixa isn’t that old a tradition, and neither is techno.)
     www.baga-biga.com, www.gose.info


© 2009 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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