Ibon Errazkin

Since the early 1990s Ibon Errazkin, working as guitarist, songwriter, and composer, has driven innovation within the Spanish independent music community by fronting the eclectic and widely admired indie pop outfit Le Mans. Across the group’s four LPs their refined forays into jazz, bossa nova, and pop earned enthusiastic critical notice throughout Europe and farther afield. In those same years Errazkin’s activities as leader and collaborator also embraced Daily Planet and Instrümental, a pair of instrumental ensembles that probed assorted dimensions of pop and dance music. Elefant Records presented his self-titled solo debut in 2000, an offbeat fusion of cocktail textures, pop, reggae, and Latin elements; the equally singular Escuela de Arte followed in 2003. Between those two records he supplied the score for director Jorge Iglesias’s 2001 film Gente Pez. In the ensuing period Errazkin undertook a range of projects, writing music for commercials, joining forces with Japanese DJ Kurando, and launching the band Single with vocalist Teresa Iturrioz. Beginning with 2006’s Pio Pio, Single released three more albums of wildly inventive pop, all for the Elefant label. Errazkin resumed solo activity in late 2017 by issuing “Foto Aérea,” the advance single from his third album of the same name. Issued in early 2018, Foto Aérea examined layered composition without fixed rhythmic meter, thereby opening new territory for Errazkin even as it stayed faithful to his singular sensibility.