1988 saw the release of one of the most revolutionary albums ever recorded in Spain, Manuel Luna's Los gallos de Londres, which sadly got a better reception abroad than it got within the domestic music scene. Being somewhat premature for a folk market that was yet to be established, the album was a...
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1988 saw the release of one of the most revolutionary albums ever recorded in Spain, Manuel Luna's Los gallos de Londres, which sadly got a better reception abroad than it got within the domestic music scene. Being somewhat premature for a folk market that was yet to be established, the album was a spearhead that allowed the different blends grown out of northern roots music to develop individual approaches that were uncontaminated by Anglo-Saxon Celticism and other pan-European trends, those trends that, more often than not, have tended to relegate proper musical identity to a background role. Thus devoid of foreign influences that were alien to its natural tradition, however adequate or inadequate they could be in a world which balances between globality and individual identity, the album stemmed from other creative criteria which grew directly from the cultural roots of the Iberian peninsula's northern music.
Manuel Luna, an anthropologist and researcher as well as a musician and singer, has chosen to refurbish that long out-of-print vinyl album, plus some new songs, with enhanced arrangements, mixes and remastering made in two steps going from 2000 to 2004 and, together with a new band, Brena la Música, and always in the same spirit, he starts anew on the footsteps of Los gallos de Londres with the release of Papelería Rocío (Objetos de Escritorio) and is sure to come back with other new projects in which he will be accompanied by this northern roots music band.
Those same tunes, newly arranged and enhanced, along with some unissued tracks, make up this innovative work that is now turned into a musical, almost poetic, dream which brings back some childhood memories of the singer. Starting from the Alameda in Santander, Papelería Rocío sends us on a flight through Cantabrian folk song to make us land in this new century with a touch of contemporary flavour. Some high profile musicians were involved in the album: the original recordings had the imprint of, among others, Luis Delgado, Cuco Pérez and Quique Valiño; later, their tracks passed over to the hands of Chema Murillo, Paco San José, José Luis Yagüe, Chisco Guazo, Fernando Gómez and Gorka Hermosa. Together they brought new expressive criteria to an individual voice that inscribes itself in the long line of northern traditional song.
Papelería Rocío is variously made up of drinking and ritual ronda songs, ballads, jotas pasiegas and a lo ligero dances, tunes with alternating major and minor modes, picayo tunes, rhumbas and pasodobles that help us relate in an intimate way with the different peculiarities of the Cantabrian mountain and country, where cattle breeding may still be transhumant and the tunes bring to mind a different conception of life and social relationships.
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