Like Proust's Cupcake: Ibon Rodriguez has taken Kafe Aleak to a bar in my village to grab a handbag full of books and I have crossed with the teenagers just out of high school on that cold fall afternoon. I'm not going to talk about these details in the articles, and I wouldn't do it if the scenes, the environment, the book content hadn't suddenly returned me to adolescence. At the time of the old magazines, the albums were downloaded at a time when one hand could tell about the geekas of the area; the press, radio, television and bars were the only channels to discover music in the days of the smoke. If I found something to hear, I would run to tell her friends. Because the song in question wasn't available in a single click, you had to use the words -- this outdated technology -- to explain why you're flirting with this group.

I'm sorry for that veneer -- I've been melancholy, snif -- but in the book I've started reading the papers that 121 people have written about 121 records, and I've been reminded of what a few years ago we talked about music in the crew. In other words, how little we speak now. I agree with Jon Eskisabel: When Kafe Aleak presented himself he wrote it in Berria, where more and more outside the concerts, the hobby for music is limited to the individual scope; that is why these kinds of initiatives are important.

An undecorated cover, an organized and simple layout, with black and white photographs and the cover of each album hand drawn, to avoid copyright problems; the images of Jon Martin, Alots Arrangi and Joseba Agirrezabalaga have also managed to give a special aesthetic to the book. This work, which seems to have been saved from the 1990s, has the advantage of having emerged in the second decade of the 21st century, when trying to find information about music risks becoming an Internet nausea. Appropriate recommendations when they are more necessary than ever.

The oldest album in the book dates back to 1958 and the most recent one in 2010. In this space you will find a large number of significant works of the Basque Country and of the international scope that, as it is said, are not all but are almost all existing. One of the points in favor of the book: I don't know many of the recommended albums and musicians, they are the stimulus to start searching.

The articles I have read have no intention of being normative; I would say that also the critics of their own office or vocation have taken up the text they have brought to this book from a personal point of view and, therefore, what they may lose in rigor, have gained in closeness and persecution. And the truth is that, looking at the list of authors, there is no alternative but to applaud the coordination work done by Leire López and Ibon Rodríguez, because the conglomerate is not a scaremongering, they have also contacted my favorite Slovenian philosopher!

I will tell you that if you want to get the book you can see on the website of Cafe and Cookies where to buy it www.kafeaetagalletak.net. Or using some specimen that has left me from the bag I picked up in the bar, you can try to get a better price by writing to gbereziartua@argia.eus.