“Topa Iñigo!”, Sagarroi’s tribute album to Iñigo Muguruza has been released

Last Thursday “Topa Iñigo!” was released
The album includes the best songs of the group Sagarroi and is a tribute to its guitarist Iñigo Muguruza
The musician from Irún would have turned 60 this December

“Topa Iñigo!” is many things at once. It is the album that closes the Kasba Music 20th anniversary collection, eleven vinyls that trace a continuous but diversified line in popular music in the Spanish State from 1993 until now. It is the album that recognizes and gives thanks to the great career of Sagarroi, a group that for many reasons did not obtain the recognition that it undoubtedly deserved, as this work confirms. It is an extremely moving album, sensitive, beautiful, a capital album, of which there are not many. And it is, in addition, the tribute album to Iñigo Muguruza in the month that would have been his sixtieth birthday.

It contains 13 songs taken from the five albums that Sagarroi published between 2001 and 2009. 13 songs that range from the rawest hardcore of their first work to something we like to call Basque blues: the guitar and voice of Iñigo Muguruza, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by the trombone of Asier Ituarte, always passionate. And in between both extremes all kinds of nuances, ska, music with Latin American roots, guitars like Jimi Hendrix, rock, delicate female voices (the work of Miren Gaztañaga), always accompanied by his squire and friend (in this case bassist) Carlos Zubikoa and with dense rhythmic bases by the drummers Gorka and Iban.

“If someone tries to take a photo of Iñigo Muguruza’s artistic career, it will come out blurry and out of focus. That’s what happens when you always move, change, that’s what happens when you’re on the border. If you come into the world in a place like that, you’re already born with the difference at a short distance, with people who look like you but aren’t like you because they live in a different fishbowl. Little by little, you discover different ways of looking that lead not to beauty in the singular but to beauty in the plural, because there isn’t just one. In the same way that truth is not only conjugated in a language. Because although it may seem paradoxical, borders don’t always isolate, they can also build bridges. Iñigo was born in Irún, a border, a place of passage, of smugglers and refugees, of comings and goings, black market and misery, paradise and exile, a permeable and changing space, an old border with England, then with the French Basque Country, during Franco’s regime an area of freedom because there they waved ikurriñas, which are forbidden here. It was right next door, so close and so far away. Unless you are born of marble, all this leaves its mark. Iñigo was not made of stone, but rather an impressionable, empathetic and vital person, with eyes that saw by looking and a sensitivity in which it was easy to leave a mark because he lived open to the world and its beauties, also to its desolations and atrocities.

This compilation album by Sagarroi (2000-2009), one of Iñigo’s many projects, set between the unexpected dissolution of Joxe Ripiau (1996-2000) and Lurra (2013-2017), is the product of that musical career in which hardcore, rock, ska, punk, reggae, cumbia, singer-songwriters, ballads, abrasion and tenderness, joy and contemplation coexist on the borders of a vast world looked upon with respect and curiosity by those who know that being born here or there is the result of chance, although this does not mean forgetting, in his case, the pride of being from a small place.” (Luís Hidalgo, journalist, fragment of the text included in the album)