Santamante, a new project by Xabier Iriondo (Afterhours)
Santa and lover is a portmanteau already in the name. The new project born during the pandemic from the meeting between the guitarist
Let’s start with the lyrics. Inner confusion, sense of loss, inability to find coordinates…
The texts are not created to affirm a position or explain something, but to create a space of forces, of attractions and repulsions, where contradictions remain open. We are interested in staying inside the fracture, not healing it. Dualism is a starting condition, not a thesis: sacred and profane, desire and guilt, control and abandonment coexist because they coexist in us. Confusion is not a limit but a living material, a place of crossing. In this sense perhaps it talks about our time: an era without stable coordinates, where identity is porous and continually rewritten. We don’t indicate routes, if anything we try to translate the confusion into sound, letting it speak with its own voice.
In this album there are legacies of the past, Üstmamò, Cristina Donà, but also omens of the music to come?
We have never worked thinking about genres as boundaries. What comes from the past is not a conscious quote, but something that we carry with us. Some writings, certain sounds, certain sensitivities are part of our emotional memory even before being musical. At the same time, electronics, repetition and noise are not aesthetic choices, but narrative necessities. They serve to create an environment, a body of sound in which the voice can become a ritual, an invocation, sometimes a wound. Craftsmanship and experimentation coexist because for us experimenting means working on matter, getting our hands dirty, listening to what happens when apparently incompatible elements touch each other.
Has rock lost its subversive edge?
Perhaps rock has lost its function as a flag, but not its capacity for transformation. Today subversion no longer comes from the form, but from the process, from the way in which one inhabits the sound, from the rejection of shortcuts, from the time dedicated to listening. We are interested in music that dialogues with other arts not to ennoble itself, but to contaminate itself. Rock, if it still makes sense, is a space of emotional and physical tension, not a genre. A place where error, silence, excess can still say something true.
Sounds but also narration, storytelling, introspection?
Santamante was born from the idea that sound and word are not hierarchical, but interdependent. The music does not accompany the lyrics, nor does the lyrics explain the music, they move together and sometimes contradict each other. The voice is often treated as a ritual instrument, not as a vehicle of univocal meaning. We are interested in the interior monologue, but exposed, vulnerable, which cracks. Aesthetics is a direct consequence of this choice: everything must serve to maintain that fragile tension between control and abandonment.
With a record like this the tour can’t just be a promotional moment.
For us live has never been a later moment. It was the first thought. The composition itself was born with the stage in mind, with the idea of a body of sound that must exist in real space and time. The concert is not a replica of the album, but the place where the songs change skin, expand, become physical. On stage the project becomes body, breath, risk. We are not interested in “playing well”, we are interested in making something happen, even at the cost of losing balance. Each live show is a temporary, unrepeatable ritual, in which the listener does not witness but participates in the same tension.
Santamante it’s a Impromptu project or a work in progress?
Santamante is a new and alive project. It is not born with a definitive form or with a deadline. It is a space that is still being built, and which will change together with those who pass through it. More than a work in progress, it is an open process, which accepts transformation as part of its identity. As long as there is a real need to explore this human, sonic and emotional territory, Santamante will continue to move.
