Dreamy avant-rock
As a result of friendship and the desire to form a band in Madrid to make new music. That’s how Daniel Ardura (Alado sincera, Sonio) and María Sáenz (Zapatotipobota, Come’n Wait) got together with Álex Canales (Atapuerca Beach, Buguibún) to form Ensaña, whose first album ‘Rosario de concesiones’ is almost an aesthetic manifesto. A declaration of intentions, where they deploy their own language with which they stretch the seams of rock to take us into a world of angular, beautiful and violent music that defines the trio as unique in its kind.
Ensaña’s music is made from amalgam metrical bases and with structures that progress in a surprising way, without knowing where they will end up taking you… but, at the same time, it is eminently melodic and of an exceptional harmonic richness. During the journey, we have the sensation of being immersed in a kind of dreamy avant-rock, where unusual counterpoint derivations are concatenated, weaving, in turn, exciting consonances between the lines, as well as inducing occasional moments of beautiful dissonance. On successive listens, one could come to think that this type of compositions may have been conceived more as poetic (and political, of course) musical artifacts or as sophisticatedly punk pieces, rather than as songs in the usual sense.
Ensaña’s vocal discourse not only transgresses the laws of linear narrative in order to place before us multiple voices -foldings or points of view- that intertwine, complement and respond concisely (now in Ardura’s voice, now in Sáenz’s voice, there are passages that even seem like abstractions in voice-over), but also the voice itself behaves as an explicit instrument. That is to say, an instrument that emits words, yes, but a monophonic instrument in the end (like the bass, for example), whose melodic articulation is almost always at the service of a subsequent harmony, of the whole. Such edifying listen! It’s true, there is no album like this one nowadays -or similar- and even less in Spanish, but the important thing is that this is only a debut! We’re in front of a fascinating band. Before that other kind of music which is impossible to describe with words because, as the second track of the album says, a thought is more precise.
