TWO DECADES OF EMOTIONAL STRATEGIES (text Víctor Nubla).

The disc presentation party Abstractea compilation of strange music made in Barcelona between 1981 and 1986, which has just published Domèstica Recordswill serve as an excuse to DJ Blue and DJ GonzoThey were invited to put the soundtrack to the festival, to prepare, if not the definitive session, a very exhaustive and complete one. The research work allowed them to gather sound materials from two decades (1975-1995), moreover, they decided to extend the field of study to the whole of Spain. The result is this three and a half hour journey through time, a fascinating journey through the musical underworld of the cities in an extremely important period, in terms of the transformation and paradigm shift that western popular music underwent in those years. These changes can probably be summarized in: dissolution of the frontier between cultured music and popular music, incorporation of electronics to musical creation, in an arc that begins in the research laboratories and ends in domestic electronics. Coexistence of the song format with repetitive minimalist models, improvisation and abstraction. These two decades are also marked by the beginning of the crisis of the music industry, simultaneously with the proliferation of self-publishing, the consolidation of the cassette format from the moment that the duplication technology allows to make editions without leaving home, and the world xarxes for the exchange of self-produced music. As a result, groups and musicians that "did not exist" for the industry, the press and the circuits became, paradoxically, the first generation to become internationalized and the one that spread here the also strange music that was made abroad.

It is an era that can be documented from singles, cassettes, compilations and more recently a few albums. It is important to take a moment to talk about the compilations, I think they can be useful to get a general idea of what was going on since they are essentially transversal and, moreover, they were produced online, often being collective and internationalist works.

The production of compilation records and cassettes in Spain has been remarkable since the 1970s (partly due to the logic generated by the difficulty of certain types of music to access a "normal" diffusion). In the 80's, moreover, with the worldwide cassette network in full effervescence, these compilations could contain local music or, very often, be totally international. Necronomicon, Terra Incognita, La Zona, Domestic Sampler Umyu, Vita Nova International, Voices, Notes + Noise, Missing Children, Conspiracy, Zamizdat Trade Journal, Independent World, Loopy But Chic, Luna y Panorama de los Insectos, Fix Planet, Veterinarios del KO's, Barcelona Ficción-Romance, Alter Músiques Nativesare some of the titles of these compendiums that were so common until well into the 90s, published in Belgium, France, USA, Spain, Italy, Germany... and almost never in the capitals of these countries, because one of the phenomena accompanying the internationalization of that kind of movement is that many of the active micro-segments were then in small cities, far from the mainstream circuit. The easy access to domestic production and the universality of mail systems brought about a territorial horizontality never seen before (except in the case of mail-art, of course).

The domestic labels, usually created by the groups themselves to spread their music, proliferated and in our territory they did it exponentially, just like in the rest of the countries. On the other hand, these bastard musics didn't have a great access to the concert circuit in any country, but there were groups in an electronic pop scene that more or less was defending itself going through clubs and festivals. These groups adopted the production and distribution systems of the more industrial scene. It is worth noting that although the use of the same means of diffusion and the "do-it-yourself" philosophy was something that all these groups shared, not all of them made music with the same intentions and objectives. There was a shared political attitude in the sense of the means of production and the means of diffusion, but in many cases the music was not made with a political will and, on the other hand, in other cases it was.

Therefore, we can speak of a happy temporary coexistence between the forces that want to occupy the space of other forces (to renew the aesthetics of popular music, to reach the mainstream market) and the forces of chaos, which conceive a tabula rasa as an objective preferable to that of a hot pot. The only problem in proving this assertion is that here, traditionally, there is no hot pot, not even for the integrated (to paraphrase Antón Ignorant). Well, digressions apart, and taking into account precisely this period of happy coexistence and cosmopolitanism, the music that you will listen to in the session of Blue and Gonzo They were the ones that, during those years, I listened to at home and at my friends' houses, in the bars where the musicians met and in the clubs where the bands played sporadically. They were the ones we produced in our own tapes or the ones sent to us by other small bands spread all over the geography. It was these cassettes, singles and compilations that now try to recover and restore current recordings interested in a period of the history of popular music in Spain that, mysteriously, has remained hidden for the following generations. An eclectic period of great artistic freedom, full of daring and uninhibited experimentation.

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