In mid-August, Bandcamp released his second album on the Cold Ground. The platform itself included it among the seven most interesting albums presented this week. The team has hardly had any need for marketing. They don't have social networks either. Word of mouth is your dissemination tool. The album has been sold this month in physical format.

Being from the coast and with that name, have you been confused with the surfer?

Yes, many times and also we are of the same age. He from Zarautz, me from Getaria. I remember that in the Messenger era, I was joined by a lot of people, I was looking at the profile and a lot of people had something to do with surfing. So I understood the thing. Then, when I lived in Barcelona, they asked me many times: “Are you a surfer?” And I: “No, no, I feel like failing, but it’s not me.”

Has surf music ever influenced you?

As a young man, I had the opportunity to enter the universe of classics like Dick Dale, Link Wray or The Ventures. It is beautiful to travel from the imaginary of the beaches of California to the distant deserts of Sergio Leone with some guitar notes without language, without voice, with reverb.

No guitar teacher?

No, I've never had it. I've always learned at home. As a young boy, I attended solugly classes under the influence of my parents. Many find it hard to understand that you can still go to the essence of things without academic study.

What were your musical references in youth?

On the one hand, the influence of the Basque punk of the 1980s was inevitable: RIP, Eskorbuto… But then we were caught by those of our time, those who came out of that basic punk: I, Lisabö… We tried to play like them with our enormous limitations. You're young, you get it all like a sponge.

Did design or music catch your attention before?

The two of them have walked quite together. In the time before the Internet we bought the cassettes, the CDs… and having the object in hand was very important. Emotionally, it was something else, and that's what really influenced the design, the reading of the covers, the letters, the contact with the object... Even if I'm not conscious, the visual aspect, the graph and the touch were important, and gradually you're picking it up. But before, it was music, and in relation to that, design.

With Oki Moki, you received a welcome last year. You moved a lot. This year you got the second job with Arrodeak on the cold Earth. Does mouth to mouth work for you?

It looks like it does. Our way of working is precisely that, to walk without pretensions. To do something honest: we've never sought to reach the mass public or be commercially successful. Without looking for a lot, and through our mouths, we’ve got concerts, both with Oki Moki and with Arrotzak. So far we have not needed more.

You mentioned the word “honesty”. Is that what a music group is asking for?

Yes, to the groups that move in our parameters, yes. I understand that for some groups music is a trade, and you have to go back and forth. Everyone has their way and I understand it, but in the circles through which I travel, honesty is essential.

Oki Moki and Arrotzak, unlike them, have in common the punk base, the difference in tone and in intensity?

The base is very similar, simple and quite simple. In that, paradoxically, experimental music that has been seen since very young in the gaztetxe of Getaria can influence. There we have received many things: I remember I was 16 years old, a Winter Wednesday, a Japanese group, all dressed up as a rabbit performing musical, for example. And maybe that's why, when I make music, I've turned to the opposite, to very basic structures. It seems to me that I tend to look for the essence.

Also the melody, even if it's bitter ...

Yes, when we got together to make strangers, we each came from something different; and the four of us wanted to go back to something more elemental, to those simpler structures that touched us as a young man. We were looking for something more direct. The stranger has melody, but is more visceral, it's like vomiting from the things of everyday life.

What characteristics does the present have in front of the philosophy of do it yourself and the punk of the 1970s and early 1980s?

I think the current impact of the Internet has changed a lot. I see him as an almost equal essence. But I think in Euskal Herria, for example, the punk groups of the 1980s were somehow looking for commercial success. Instead of Do it yourself, I would say they followed the homemade philosophy. Everyone recorded their first job at their place because they didn't have anything else, but for me the do it yourself is more a way to understand things: A way of saying “we don’t want to arrive”, understanding as a whole the way of making music and music. And success doesn't matter at all.

Do you understand music like this?

Yes, yes… Music is for us a way to feel alive, not to live from it. It's a way of communicating and connecting with people, that is, humanely, and not thinking about the clouds of success. I mean, it's a success for us to meet people, to connect with people. Meeting people who enjoy what you do is amazing.

Bearing in mind your name, do you feel oblivious to the music of Basque Country?

No, but you see that each group goes a little bit on its way. The name came because the four members of the group were about to make our lives outside of their people; we went back to the people and so we named the group, without thinking too much about it.

Do you feel or not close to groups with common sound characteristics?

We have moved more by the way we do things, and not so much by the musical style or the sound. For example, comparing with Oki Moki, we don't have anything like it at least around us. But many times we feel closer to Zarautz's Gaztetxe than to a Donostia pop group. With the Killerkume in Bilbao we do not have any kind of similarity, but we have always moved in the same operating parameters and felt much closer than many other groups. Or the Vulk.

The current meaning of the word underground. Does it have any meaning?

I see that very worn word. I see that at the big festivals absorbed by several young multinationals on the train, they're looking for commercial success, and they all use that damn word -- and I don't know what to think. I see it very distorted, confused, seeing how people who come from another world use it.

Some say that rock and roll, or that its base is depleted as an agent, and that new rock are street genres like rap, trap, reggaeton.

I see this assertion quite obligatory. The trap erupted two or three years ago, and you will have to see the path that follows… but it is true that they are changing the punk’s forms: to provocation and to that small media has perhaps now touched the trap: doing what is done at home, vomiting what the interior asks you to do and teach the songs, without the need to release albums… that seems great. Trapa, like gender, is a matter for the time being, but new technologies are going to have a huge influence on how to make music.

Writing and singing in English (Oki Mokin), Basque and Spanish (Arrotzaken). There is a feature of your generation. How does one language or another come from?

In Arrotzak we were clear that we would speak in Basque, and I had long wanted to listen and use Hitan in the songs. I think it would be very suitable for the punk groups of the 1980s; the hika was heard in the bars of our people, let's not say in the atmosphere of the fishermen, but not in the songs. Warm juice of songs! If you want to start rage and malaostia, better than that street hitan! The Hitman is a good instrument and I have almost never heard him sing.

What about Spanish?

We have made the Basque language very natural in Getaria, we have not had the threat that other places have had to lose their language. And in those places they have automatically felt a need to speak in Basque, because otherwise they could threaten to lose it. We have not had that pressure, and I think with another peace of mind we have heard music in English, or we have punctured a song in Spanish, or in Russian, or in Japanese… and also to sing, as an instrument of expression, I have felt the desire and the need to convey some ideas in Spanish.

But also in Basque you feel the need…

Yes, and with Arrotzak I do many letters in Basque. I think the best thing for many things is the Basque country.

What was Getaria’s gaztetxe for you?

A place where my head had opened and I had burst. Over the past 15 years, more than 300-400 groups, and of all kinds, of very different places, styles and formations have come together. A great school. Gaztetxe is a place where we have been overcoming many prejudices. And we've learned a way to do things.

For example?

For example, many groups that have come from outside have taught us humility. Have dinner with us at gaztetxe, and when you've picked up and cleaned your plate, for example. Because the opposite has happened to us: that there are groups here who, after organizing the concerts, have a very different attitude, that there are complaints. We've learned to lower humility and ego. “I’m no more than anyone and I don’t have to prove anything.” We all do it together.