INDUCING THE PLEASURE DREAMS
“In 1995 Justo Bagüeste released a record called I.P.D. (his first album released on Geometrik Records). The album claimed to induce the listener a pleasant dream, heading for the final sprint towards that collective promise beyond the end of the millenium. I.P.D. was some sort of Goldberg Variations for the turn of the century, played on mini moogs, short-wave radios and analog synths.
On October 29th 2016, Justo Bagüeste and Suso Saiz (producer of the 1995 album) performed at Periferias Festival in Huesca. They were to play a reinterpretation of the recording they had made twenty years before. After them played Hans Joachim Roedelius, outstanding member of a generation of German musicians in the 70’s who used electronic as a means to overcome an ominous past. That evening was entitled Glided Harmonies.
However, Bagüeste and Saiz didn’t appear nostalgic nor revisionist: just a certain atmosphere and a few innermost samples linked the concert to the 1995 recording. Firmly stuck in that moment, they offered a session of sonic haze based on dialogue and improvisation. The 40 minutes of music we are now examinating stem from that haze.
Like a vitalistic statement, a heartbeat and a human voice open the first track Nóstos. We are inmediately plunged into a boundless sea of textures and synthetic serpentines entitled Margen de Indefinición (Margin of Vagueness). Undoubtely this is a dream in motion: maybe we are in a cryogenic cabin, inside a spaceship, travelling bound to the year 2000 again. In the meantime, some rhythmic turbulences show up, they make us dream of a Despertar (Awakening) between faraway saxophones, glided guitars, reminiscences of Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. The final stretch starts in tension, mired in an inner conflict Cerca de Algún Lugar (Close to somewhere). After a shamanic-like voice, the session leads us to a backwater of spacious ambient music with stitches of sax and guitar, describing a trascendental Implosión (Implosion) ended with unrepentant heartbeats again.

This re-reading of I.P.D. is like an agile pirouette against the inertia of time. It reminds us of how intimately electronic music was related to spirituality since the beginning, and how that bond seems to have diluted now that we live in the 21st century, in the factual setting of so many utopian fantasies from the past. Bagüeste and Saiz evoke the enthusiasm of the future pasts. They recall that promise of plenitude through technology that never was. At the same time, they update that promise before our ears, naturally and fully aware.”
Javier Aquilué -2019
Limited Edition 500 copies