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Written in fRoots issue 361, July 2013

RADIO COS
Radio Cos
Fol Música 100FOL1067 (2013)

Quique (Henrique) Peón and his sister Mercedes learned from and recorded musicians around Galicia’s villages, and he played percussion in the band put together to play the music on her wonderful first album Isué. He’s become a leading choreographer of folk-dance based spectacles, but in the duo Radio Cos with fellow singer-pandeireteiro Xurxo Fernandes he’s a singer and player of pandeireta (tambourine), making robust, jubilant music with its heart in the old way of gutsy acoustic music that was the sound of Galicia’s homes, streets, bars and fiestas before big stages and amplification.
     Only now, after gigging around Galicia and abroad for some nine years, has the duo committed to CD and, as with Mercedes’s debut, it releases a pent-up force of rich material, powerfully sung and played, handled beautifully by up-front, non-studio-timid production.
     Quique and Xurxo are joined by accordionist Xan Pampin, violinist Nikolay Velikov and Pedro Lamas on gaitas, soprano sax, dulzaina and other reeds, adding in a bunch of other thumpy and clattery traditional percussion and sounds of the street, bars, vehicles, voices, cowboy-film gunshots and exuberant shouts and cackles of alegría carrying the music along in a rich, engaging, vivid stream.
     It’s mostly Galician traditional music, but also has exotic touches from the ‘café aman’ mix of Sephardic and Ottoman musics that Xurxo focuses on in another project, Jako El Muzikante, while Ándele Imende lurches happily in a Mexican cantina direction complete with spaghetti-Western gunshots.
     Magnificent, huge fun. Straight to the heart of Galician music, and onto my ‘all-time favourites’ shelf, alongside Mercedes’s Isué.

www.folmusica.com


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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