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Written in fRoots issue 206/207, 2000


HEVIA
Tierra De Nadie - No Man’s Land
EMI 526 2802 (2000)

This album has sold more than any other Spanish release in the two years since its release, with its opening track Busindre Reel spending four months at number one in the Spanish singles chart, and sales of the album so far totalling over a million. Though it has been released across Europe and in the USA, the machinations of transnational label decision-making have resulted in its taking two years to emerge in the UK, accompanied by an archetypally ignorant and uncomprehending press release. A sample: “Their music has been described as ‘the Gypsy Kings meets Riverdance’”.
      No, no, wait, read on. 'They' are a he, José Angel Hevia, a very good Asturian bagpiper whose traditional credentials are many, including co-writing an excellent tutor book on his instrument. Already a leading figure in the current renaissance of Asturian music, he made a finely-crafted, all-stops-out album of traditional themes and his own compositions, using as tools the full range of studio and instrumental technology, including the patented midi gaitas he co-developed, and was apparently as surprised as anyone at its commercial success.
      The opening didgish drone, washy synth and low whistle sound might prompt dread, but then the pipes kick in, joined by a hefty percussion groove, lifting it out of the mists of bland, a process continued by a brief burst of the splendid traditional voice of Mari Luz Cristóbal Cauneda. The opener was the hit single, but it isn’t particularly the standout track - the whole album flows full of energy and variety.
      The grooves aren’t a cynical, remixer’s sort of overlaid thing, but integral and constructed around a strong core of traditional Asturian instruments, as well as the machine-gun high-tension snares of the controversial Scottish-style pipe bands which have arisen in northern Spain. Nor are they unrelenting; there are slow, lyrical tracks too, and while there are a fair few synthy pads, normally a switch-off trigger, they’re always enlivened by pokey real sounds, and somehow the whole thing carries one along with its exuberance, upfrontness, excellence of production and its general delight in the things one can do. It’s essentially instrumental, but there’s a lot of vocal character in the playing, and there are wild and grainy interjections of traditional voices including those of pandeiretera group Colectivu Muyeres.
      While of course there are other references, and it’s not the first album to try if one wants to identify the core characteristics of Asturian traditional music, there’s nevertheless a lot of that here, underlying and within, and it’s via albums such as this and Galician Carlos Núñez’s recordings that many people in Iberia itself have had cause to become enthusiastic about music and instruments most had written off as folkloric and uncool. Whether or not Tierra de Nadie is now too popular to be considered hip, it’s a mighty enjoyable, full-blooded piece of work, and as the gaita renaissance surges ahead a lot of young players and audiences are finding new delight and direction in musics that, in Asturias, had dwindled almost to extinction.
  

© 2000 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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