XAK
Xak
Mukuru, 2025

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If you’ve listened and you haven’t been sober, I’d tell you: listen again. The Bajoran Paxkal Irigoyen just made what will be my favorite album of the year, this time under the name of XAK. And pay attention, because in 2021 we wrote similar about his project Bloñ, and now they are talking about awards and full rooms.

It seems that this multi-instrumentalist artist has included the name in a box and confused it, and that XAK is a new name formed with the letters that have come out of it. Paxkal usually does the same with music: put ideas, melodies and styles in a box, mix and draw an infinite number of colors. And what beautiful songs!

Paxkal always thinks about making you hear something you haven't heard. Avoid the simplest formulas for the ears, and give a little more spin to the songs, melodies and arrangements, avoiding the uses and conventions. It won't fit into any mold, starting with the smallest thing: “Sometimes in the winter, I don’t change the orena.”

Paxkal makes room for strangeness whenever he can, but this time, I would say that he has sought to make the most beautiful album he has ever made. The most beautiful in the aesthetic sense. How is it possible to escape the mold and do something restful and beautiful? That's Paxkal's magic.

Because this isn't a record. It's an invitation to enter the Paxkal universe. If you didn't get it at the first audition, go again. Paxkal is an access to a rich world and let yourself travel more and more, you will fly farther and farther away.

Markotx Iribarn of Lasa said at the funeral of his daughter Leire: “Watching the stars move, we’ll know you’re giving a concert.” In XAK the winter and the stars are present, and it is impossible not to understand this album from the taste of mourning. XAK is an album that has drawn beauty from pain and that, in addition to a permanent pinch to the heart, proposes a beautiful future, lived without forgetting, that has been by our side. What luck we had to meet Leer.

Paxkal – and his friends from Garza – have healed their wounds, lit fires in the mountains so that “the sky is lit in the dark of the night”. And purpose and recognition: “So that you can see them from where they were, so that you know, / That I was still watching you in the memories.”