The Spanish Avant-Garde, apparently.

Ubu-web, one of my favorite sources for information about and recordings of deeply weird music of the last century or so, has just posted a page dedicated to the Spanish avant-garde here.

I don't fully understand what that means yet, and I'm not terribly familiar with experimental music in Spain - my biggest exposure to Spanish creative musicians so far has been going to grad school where a composition professor was a pretty arch-conservative composer who liked to write everything in the same time signature. But briefly skimming, this seems like a pretty interesting anthology of strange music, with a range of sonic abnormality from proto-New Wave non-dance music (Esplendor Geometrico sounds like Suicide en Espanol) to environmental soundscape to academic electronic play.

I intend to revisit this link after a busy weekend with some more thorough reviews, but skimming briefly as I did this morning, I am hearing a pretty interesting document of Spain in the late 1970s. Not too different than what was going on in New York or London, but a bit more mechanical and aggressive than a lot of similar stuff from other countries. No doubt, with some extra time to reflect and listen closely, I'll find a way to talk about a culture coming out of dictatorship and dealing with newly found freedom after becoming accustomed to extreme control, or something like that. For now, at least I've found a fun web page to share.