18 October, Bera: Making an escape from the cold that starts to be noticed in the street, we enter the Kataku Inn, full of water. Today is the day of the concert, the baztane group Kaskezur will present Ihesi animals, a new work published by the quartet after Azpisugeak 2017, which caught the attention of many music lovers: ten songs, shows the nonconformist attitude of the group. Hurrah! The first piece, entitled “Suddenly the earth became a roof and things began to fall upward,” recounts a surreal situation, and although the sound of the group won’t go so far when it becomes the owner of the pension, the concert will be warm. A micro will jump to the audience for the second song, at a time of guitar shaking, the beverages of the components will disperse down the stage floor and will finish measuring the physical resistance of the battery, which seems to have played more than predicted. Memorable.

A couple of weeks later we sat down with two members of the group at the corner of the Katakrak bookstore in Pamplona. At a time of the interview reference will be made to this concert. “We try to be quite free live,” says Ion Mindegia, one of the guitarists and group voices. “The instruments we play are rather analogous. You feel the strength of your finger, of your stomach... If you work these dynamics, you can't match it." Next to him is Iñigo Belzunegi, another guitar and voice, which has turned backwards, starting with the atmosphere of Kataku: “I was introduced to the rock world by the old cousins. I remembered that it was the servant going up on stage, the one going out ... Now I don’t see it, and for me it’s one of the most important things in this whole story.”

Is this direct attitude one that has persisted since the beginning of Kaskezur? In the mid-2000s, the band started making Nordic rock and roll and published two albums. Later, with Ilgora (2013), he began the search for a more appropriate path, in which the third season is that of the animals that flee. “Our point of view has changed, we have cleaned the guitars and we want to have more color,” says Mindegia. Belzunegi added that this latest work “has more ups and downs” than the previous album. “We want to learn how to be in the songs in less quiet conditions,” he continued. This will be one of the most important topics of the conversation: what can arise from discomfort.

It's not something that you practice just as a musician. Belzunegi explained that he is also looking for music listeners who do not enter so easily in the first hearing: “He who enters the first can get bored,” he says, while discomfort “builds other paths.” Mindegia has led the issue to a specific example: “Where there are two guitars, sometimes I like one to be challenged, because that’s moving apart from the clichés. For me it is what keeps you alive, a kind of resistance.”

Of course, the music made from that starting point is not an easy disc for the animals that flee. But its complexity does not become cryptic, because it maintains a pop structure. “I always set the example of Wilco,” says Mindegia: “A fairly typical structure, but at one point they lose to look for something else.” In the search for that other work, Ibai Gogortza, from Borrokan, has collaborated in this last album. “For example, The Gestures in the Song told us: ‘Try it in the first and a half minutes without singing’; it has helped us a lot to introduce another point of view.”

Connection to Bera

The album Gogortza is not the only Beratan connection it has: whoever listens to the second song (Euria) will find something known: The second song of the album by Joseba Irazoki, Euria ari, had the same lyrics as on the previous occasion. A version? Free adaptation? “We don’t know what to call it,” Mindegia said. “The lyrics came above the music and looked like a negative version of Irazoki’s. We commented with Joseba, he was happy – well, Joseba is always happy – and he told us that he was excited; and we: ‘No, the illusion is ours!’ And then he put the guitar in that song."

The voice of Miren Narbaiza Mice can also be heard in the song Buztinezkoa, which seems designed to make the audience jump. “We always saw each other in the concerts, then we played Joseba B together. Lenoir and Kaskezur; and after Azpisugea, Miren and Joseba came to record. Then we've had a relationship, there was always something to do together. Finally, when we were going to record the album, we said: Will you sing? and she did. And in addition, in more punk singing. Miren’s voice is not so nice and oneiric, it’s correct, and I think it helps there be a woman’s voice there too,” explains Mindegia. The lyrics of this song came from a conference on Oteiza offered in Pamplona Oskar Alegria and Bernardo Atxaga. After watching a video by Orio's artist, Alegría said: “You’ve seen what mud thinking, he’s clay, he’s got mud brains, mud ideas.” Repeat the song again Quosque Tandem…! Drink from what he said in the book about the Basque style: “Free, natural, continuous and itinerant”.

Sonic Youth, who was already intubated on the previous album, continues to have its seal, but Kaskezur continues his way, feeding on the discomfort: “We don’t know where to go, but that attitude opens up a path,” says Belzunegi. “I think these songs are understood, but I would like in the future to go to other situations, to more different situations. It can be the way to seek evolution.” In the next work you will see where the search will take place. At the moment, the concerts are almost all weekends tied until January: Don't let these animals escape.