The second album of the vinyl collection of Kasba’s 20 years is now on the streets

This is “Dels rics i dels pobres”, the third album by the legendary Pixamandúrries that was recorded 29 years ago

Pixamandúrries was a group created in Empordà in 1989. Their career was short but intense and productive and they left a mark that we can easily recognize today. Among its merits, having been the first so-called “Catalan rock” group to tour France and Germany.

However, its members always fled from that label. In 1990, the group published its first album, “Quina vida”, but dissatisfied with the commercial and promotional treatment of the Picap label, they broke up and quickly began to chart their own path, a fact that distanced them from “Catalan rock” and it quickly brought closer to alternative social movements and hardcore punk formations with social and political ties.

In 1993 they self-released their second album, “L’any dels gossos”, and with it they took a step forward in linguistic matters, presenting songs in Catalan, Esperanto, Arabic or Spanish, a fact that philosophically began to bring them closer to cross-cultural groups. over or what was later called mestizo music.

In January 1994, just weeks after the Zapatista uprising in the mountains of Chiapas (Mexico), the group recorded “Tierra y Libertad”, a single that was published days later and which was the first solidarity action with the Zapatista movement carried out in Spain. That single had a lot of echo, even internationally, and the group multiplied its performances beyond Catalonia, performing throughout the linguistic territory, from Elche to Ciutadella or Ciutat de Mallorca, and even beyond because in January 1995 they went on that tour by France and Germany.

Now, 29 years after the planned publication date (Tralla Records had to publish it in February 1995), the vinyl edition of “Dels rics i dels pobres” is released, the group’s last album, which was never published. Kasba Music releases it as the second album in the vinyl collection commemorating its 20th anniversary because it is the last album that Joni recorded as a musician.

It is an album rich in nuances, where the musical base is hardcore punk but with a constant presence of traditional Catalan music and with approaches to Latin music, which continued to bring them closer to the currents of miscegenation. Instrumentally, as a hardcore punk group, the use of percussion and gralla was surprising, which gave a party feeling to their energetic performances and which today is fully assumed.

Philosophically, the members of the group had immersed themselves fully in the realities of indigenous American societies and we find a great presence of their struggles in this album, from “La bonaj vortoj” which is an adaptation in Esperanto of the letter that the indigenous chief Seattle sent to the President of the United States, from “Saldu auna” a free interpretation of a song written in Yahi (a disappeared native language of North America), to “Tot per tots” (about the Zapatista proclamations) or “La història dels assassins 2” (about the current effects of post-colonial exploitation).