The climax, in which the outburst occurs, follows – as the dictionary says – the dual path of ecstasy and rage. An eruption only exists in that elusive limbo that opens between brightness and fury. Something of both meanings and more is contained in Iván Zulueta’s famous 1979 film of the same name, a story of those who, through art, drugs and sex, cling to the memory of transcendence from which it has become obscure over the years Projection onto an admired cult work. The San Sebastian filmmaker (1943-2009) was obsessed with moving images and vampirizing objects capable of condensing and devouring parts of life until the victim of their influence is left ineffective. He collected reels after reels of material shot in Super-8 and 16 millimeters, an archive based on family images and experimental projects that the Spanish Film Library acquired in 2021. Around this time, Jota, leader of one of the most important national indie groups, Los Planetas, received an unexpected call: Josetxo Cerdán, the institution’s director, asked him to put this partially unpublished material to music. “I assume that Zulueta’s aesthetic positions correspond very closely to those of Los Planetas,” the musician suspects of the reason for this contact. “We both come from a very critical counterculture. It’s not necessary to connect a lot of dots to find similarities.”
Under the name Plena Pause, Juan Ramón Rodríguez Cervilla alias Jota (Granada, 1969) released this Friday the album resulting from this commission, a proposal that will be played live in the next few months at various film festivals (October Corto of Arnedo); Seminci from Valladolid; Zinebi from Bilbao and the Lope de Vega Theater from Seville). With a suitably psychedelic cover designed by Javier Aramburu – the legendary cover artist of Los Planetas and several other groups, a task that Zulueta also carried out at the time – this is the title of what has become his debut solo album after three decades Trajectory with Los Planetas and other parallel formations alludes to a poignant idea that flies over Arrebato: that of the pause as a “vanishing point”, the “last opportunity” to quench the thirst of those who want to capture the eternal. “I think Iván refers to the moment of artistic creation in which he feels an epiphany, a moment that brings happiness, and I assume that he makes artists dedicate themselves to that moment,” explains the singer, protected behind a cap and sunglasses sofa in front of the windows of the cafeteria of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid accompanied by a bottle of water. “And this breakout is easier to achieve in the most independent way possible,” he adds of the absence of his usual companions, who at this point were focused on personal projects.
When Jota Arrebato saw Arrebato for the first time in the 1980s, he found a film that was “radically different” from anything he had known before. “I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember it because it’s formally new. “It was also about a topic that was transcendent for me at the time, namely dealing with drugs and the way you approach art and how these elements can absorb you,” he remembers, sometimes conversationally, sometimes doubtfully. “The truth is, it had a profound influence on me.” Decades later, he was once again overwhelmed by that tide of greatness given the five hours of material the film library made available to him. “It was a very powerful, mystical and powerful experience because in these images many things about the history of Zulueta are revealed,” he reflects. “It is the same films that Eusebio Poncela and Cecilia Roth see in Arrebato that Will More sends them that these protagonists and Zulueta herself absorb.” And suddenly they come to me, without almost anyone else having seen them, and ask me to solve this mystery.”
About “Electric Storm,” Pedro Sánchez said it was a “great song.” He replies that the president is “a very interesting person.”
The mystery of the decisive moment, this kidnapping, for which more than one would give up their existence as payment, is solved in Plena Pause in 10 songs on vinyl and CD (plus another five on DVD, which provide music for a total of 14 films). where the melodies of Jota, surrounded by the distinctive sound of Los Planetas, merge with Zulueta’s images to tell the filmmaker’s journey parallel to his own intimacy. “Y la nave va”, the song that opens the album, is clothed in the melancholy that runs through the family pictures taken by Zulueta’s father in the thirties and forties, up to pieces like “Natalia dice”, in which The persistence of The wound opened by the pandemic is overlaid by common influences with the director, from The Velvet Underground to Jonas Mekas, reflected in Zulueta’s work for TVE as well as in his first feature film Un dos tres, al escondite Inglés 1970 “Arrebato (A Good Day for Iván)” returns to the Los Planetas classic “A Good Day” and as in songs like the enveloping “Hotel” (actually two songs for the same video), Jota plays with the synchronization of letters and Images that reveal hypnotic symbolic games. Regarding “Electric Storm,” Pedro Sánchez, an avowed fan of Los Planetas, assured that it was a “great song.” Jota, who met with the president in May, returned the compliment by calling him “a very interesting person.”
La Plena Pause by Jota comes after other approaches to modernity from looking into the past, from La Legend of Space (2007), the album on which Los Planetas began flirting with flamenco with the help of Enrique Morente, to his projects Los Evangelistas, together with Lagartija Nick and Fuerza Nueva, in collaboration with Niño de Elche. “In the last Los Planetas albums and with Fuerza Nueva we have tried to keep up with the social, political and economic situation we are living through, which is quite scary. There is a fascism the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930s,” he warns. “This album, however, represents a pause in what Iván Zulueta proposes in his work: to create a bubble outside an unbreathable world.” Given what he sees as “the end of the cycle of Western civilization,” he assures not to to think a lot about the posterity of his work and, unlike Zulueta, not to leave an archive that functions as a testament. “Everything I do, I publish: I publish it and ignore it,” he admits. Because he doesn’t know, he doesn’t even know what will happen in his immediate future, whether alone or with his band: “We don’t make long-term plans,” he says. “Right now I’m more concerned with surviving the present.”
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