Kepa Junkera

Published by DEIA, Sept. 15, 2011

All the results from the people’s group activity that concentrate in a determined place call our attention. To me markets, the turmoil of the stores, the bargaining or the people’s conversations in the different stands produce a sensation of life for me, of well-being that I have even tried to materialize in my last album “Ultramarinos & Coloniales”.  At the end they are so many stories, so many memories, which everything is engraved deep inside of us.

In the world there are many markets and it is difficult for me to just highlight ones from others because each one has his own charm, but the other day I saw a peculiar one, I’m not sure in saying it is fascinating or just crazy.  It is about The Death Market, situated in a small town of Samut Songkhram, around 100km from Bangkok, Thailand. It is an open market (flee market) in which, when you discover its secret, you cannot believe it.  It is in the middle of a railroad! Several times a day the train goes right through the middle of this unique bazaar obliging the salespeople to move their stands just in time so the train can pass, then replacing the stock again in its place to sale as if nothing has happen. Everything happens in a normal way, without a lot of hassle, because the salespeople of The Death Market have an incredible ability to set and remove their stands, so when the train comes close they have to clear the track for the monster that every day makes his way literally over all their products.

The capacity that we have from adaptation in our environment is incredible and how when we value something we make good use of it, to its maximum. And it is a pity that when something is abundant or easy to achieve it loses all our interest and even we throw it away. In this case the space is a scarce good and I ask myself:  What wouldn’t these people do in one of those giant-sized shopping centers that we visit continuously and that have corridors and stores with so ample spaces?

The man’s imagination is able to derive benefit from what almost does not exist and I say almost because all that is imagined already has one way or another its existence.

www.kepajunkera.com

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Published by DEIA, August 18, 2011

It’s the middle of the night, Tuesday August 16. I get up and it’s 3 in the morning. I turn the TV on and a gentleman is reading the Tarot cards.  A great many of people would wish to know which is going to be their future, according to them, to be able to take the correct decisions in their life.  Is the future written out?  What a fantastic mystery! Just image when I started to “play” with that old trikitixa, with one or two broken-down buttons, if somebody would have been able to tell me the essential point that it would be for me in my life. Seated in the living room, I look back on my long and fascinating career that I have taken to stub with this bellows of hell behind my back and I awake up from that journey with the vertigo of facing in a few hours a new project: Recording next to the Symphony Orchestra of Basque Country, directed by Enrique Ugarte, some of the most important themes of my career. Of course the idea impassions me and at the same time it is a hoped-for project years ago. It is not easy to try to join two worlds like the one of classical music with the folk music or more traditional.  Few times they interweave. We already work side by side previously in a concert officiated at the Kursaal of Donostia, but now we are going to ruffle up the curl and to make together, in a different and more innovative way, the themes selected for such project, side by side, that will be from those beginning songs that accompany me from the very start of my music career till the last new album Ultramarinos & Coloniales.  Definitively, we want to achieve a high-quality music and energy album filled with illusion, effort and lots of talent.  Who would have said year’s ago that a trikitixa would be seen accompanied by the whole symphony orchestra? I´m so excited thinking about that, aside from being new recording album, we are also creating new roads to explore, as much in classical music as in traditional one, uncovering new frontiers to an instrument like the trikitixa. I hope that between all of us we will be able to materialize all the unique and special moments that we are going to live thanks to the music. Now if the future of today was written or not in the present of yesterday, it’s the least important.  Break a leg!!!!

www.kepajunkera.com

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Published by DEIA, June 30, 2011

Seated in my chair taking notes over my small sensations that comes to my mind in my notebook remembering the first time that I stepped on Moroccan lands, our destiny? The city of Tangier, to attend the Tarab Tangier, international festivity of folk music in which we were invited to share our music with groups of India, Iran, Portugal and Bulgaria.

Tangier is a city in the northern part of Morocco situated at the coasts of the Strait of Gibraltar, and example of a different neighbor’s culture. The Festivity, in his third edition and under the motto Crossroads, took place the 22nd till the 26th of June, in which we performed Saturday the 25th. It’s time to go out on stage and we perform in a privileged surrounding, a Portuguese’s fortress of the XVIIth century on the dock. I was delighted by the spirit of this soul festivity as a distinguish link of artistic and cultural international interchange level. Coincidences of life, we had just released our new project Ultramarinos & Coloniales and, all of a sudden, I see myself walking by those incredible Medinas, (The Medinas are the most exciting places of most of the Moroccan cities. In them are concentrated a great commercial, cultural and free activity of the population) alleys as if fraught mazes of commerces and stands, with unique colors, radiating life. Exclusives corners that is necessary to search for to discover part of this culture and a kind of so odd life. Even in the same festivity they offered us their typical foods with lots of spice, different and very suggestive flavors that are also a part of the surroundings and the culture of a fascinating country. As I understand it I think that is how a festival should be, representing an interchange with the people from out of town, carrying out a true cultural encounter across-the-board.

After the presentation, straight off the street at the old quarter of Bilbao, Ultramarinos & Colonial begins his way walking through the different stages that we will wander around for the next few months. Now it is our turn, let’s pull on stage the rhythms, melodies and all the emotions that we are capable to create: “these are our products”. And I insure you that the people of Tangier…Have shopped!!!

www.kepajunkera.com

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Published by DEIA, June 23, 2011

Inerasable memories of unmistakable aromas and unique characters that they become part of an “external” family that they accompanied the happy and unconscious step of my childhood.

The grocery stores have marked that different view of the close; daily commerce’s and above all family style that today in day, for several motives, it´s almost hard to even find one.

Taking a walk by the 7 streets I delved into that memory and I came up with the idea of dedicating them this new record, because at the bottom I have tried to materialize, thanks to music, the same sensations that one experiences when he enters an establishment of that nature, discovering always new details and different aromas, but on a known base.

In this project I have counted only on the collaboration of the musicians of my band, and the fact is that it has been on purpose, because I wanted to get that special sonority that in the course of the years has accompanied me in my concerts, mixed with my compositions where, almost without meaning to, they have kept on surfacing quantity of feelings and own experiences lived in these few years. I want to thank to all and every one of the people that have helped to “wrap up” this dream in that brown paper for the effort and the support and, mainly, to José Luís Canal, for his attitude and the dedicated affection while we traveled side by side to far away places of the soul to bring part of rhythms and the melodies that the album holds.

The cycles follow and the stories repeat itself, and these commerce will return to reappear. I am sure, because I believe that we live in a moment where we begin to appraise and needing more of the real than the superfluous or the accessory for very nice, perfect and practical that they can sell it. Each day we agreed and we look intensely for the heart of the essence, escaping of the right things but insipid, of the perfect but empty.

With freedom and the confidence of what it is offered. Insurance of quality and the affection put in this elaboration and presentation: ULTRAMARINOS & COLONIALES (GROCERY & COLONIAL STORE), because always there are music fluttering in the memories

www.kepajunkera.com

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