Baiuca walks forward, discussing himself. Not to stay in one place too long, he says, and that place is demarcated, in a way, by his research into Galician folklore and his dedication to avant-garde electronic forms. Barullo, his third album, confirms this: Alejandro Guillán himself, the man behind Baiuca, understands it as a response to his previous work, Haunted. “I always try to come up with new ideas, I don’t like repeating myself or artists who repeat themselves,” he says in conversation with elDiario.es. And to do this he turned this time to the dance floor. But not towards the party field, but towards the club.
Hauntedreleased in 2021, was a concept album. And the concept was “super dark, mystical, focused on Galician mythology.” At the same time, the musical tradition is located at a more primary level: the percussion, the voices of the singers, the rhythms of the xota or muiñeira testifies to this. Hubbub suggests another method. “All these elements have entered my DNA, they have been integrated,” explains Guillán (Catoira, Pontevedra, 1990) from his home in Barcelona, where he rests for a few days in the middle of the tour to present the recording, “now, I don’t need to show them explicitly anymore.” Conversely, electronics emerged without qualms.
“In another time I would hide it, but now I don’t care,” he says, referring to his use of structures derived from close listening to British garage, breakbeattrance or deep house. The promotional sheet – like their previous works, the album is released by Raso – sums it up as follows: these electronic trends “have more than ever a presence in compositions that sound like both raver classics and folk classics”. And with a certain pop air, Guillán himself admits, provoked above all by the appearance of the voices. They range from Felisa Segade, member of Leilía – the group that brought the Galician tambourine to stages around the world and contributed decisively to the revaluation of the instrument -, to Carlangas, former leader of Novedades Carminha and now alone to devote himself to popular music. .
“To begin with, I don’t sing,” responds Guillán, when asked about the abundance of singing collaborators, “but also each song has its personality.” Antía Ameixeiras, from the avant-folk duo Caamaño & Ameixeiras, also participates in three pieces, Lilaina, from Aliboria, in another, and Xurxo Fernandes with Segade in Pocket knivesthe song that opens the work: “I brought two new knives / to make a link / between those who walk without dancing / and those who have an intention.” “I don’t like to force relationships, I like it to be something natural,” she explains, “and to surround myself with people with whom I feel comfortable. In the long albums it is also very important for me that Galicia is present, showing voices that are not so well known outside. And with whom, in a certain way, he shares a libertarian approach to folklore.
The evolution to achieve Hubbub It was pretty organic. There was no prior idea, as there was in Hauntedbut make music like someone experimenting in a laboratory. “Sometimes there are periods, it happens to me during tours, when I disconnect, but now I wanted to record again. I started experimenting and when I had two or three songs, I detected common themes,” he explains, “fast rhythms, melodic vocals… music more oriented towards dance, towards club”. The spirit of Hubbub“twist, amplify and resignify ‘modern foliage,'” according to the promo note, with songs about what happens at night and around the dance floor. AND Mount Visothe classic place of Compostela to which Carlangas lends a contained and mechanical voice.
The generation that returned to folk in different ways
Guillán does not like to take on a pioneering role. Others before him collided the Galician musical tradition with electronic sounds, from Ugia Pedreira’s short-lived Ensemble Ecléctica to some experiments by the famous bagpiper Carlos Núñez – with whom Baiuca collaborated on an EP two years ago – until the noise radicalism of Lume. to the incursions of the Mercedes Peón reference. “Obviously I’m not the first,” he surmises, “but maybe there aren’t many who have done it in the sense that I’m doing it.” Baiuca brings avant-garde electronics into folk coordinates and vice versa. And that’s the territory he’s been working in since at least 2017, when he began releasing the EPs that would eventually make up the bulk of Solporhis first full album.
Trained in traditional music schools and himself a bagpipe player, Alejandro Guillán recognizes himself as part of a generation that returned to folklore itself through diverse and sometimes antagonistic routes. “That’s what’s interesting,” he says, the distance between the enormous commercial success of the Tanxugueiras games with the so-called urban rhythms and their increasingly abundant epigones and the electro folk of Baiuca, to place two hypothetical extremes. It is, after all, one of the strong lines of contemporary pop – in the broad sense of the term – which seeks a sense of the future in the rereading of its roots and which concerns, for example, the majestic doom folk of the time. Irish Lankum, to the melodic restructuring of Occitan Sourdure or to Rodrigo Cuevas – appeared in Haunted and recorded new, previously unreleased material with Guillán.
Baiuca has just offered its live performance in Formentera (Balearic Islands) and Melilla. The next concerts, which will feature Adrián Canoura for audiovisual, Andréu Fábrega for lighting, and regular musicians of the project like Xosé Lois Romero or Antía Muíños, will take place in Madrid (format showcase), Hamburg (Germany) or Murcia. December “will be calmer” and in January he will return to London (Great Britain).
