Garazi Navas

Garazi Navas is an accordionist from the Basque Country, who, despite her youth, has developed a unique approach to the instrument, melding together elements from Basque folk music, classical music and experimental music.

Garazi completely floored us with her performance at Sholto Dobie’s Juana Muzika festival in Vilnius back last April. What is particularly striking about her approach to the accordion is the sheer physicality of it. Wind is squeezed, pulled and rattled from the instrument’s frame, producing dense clusters of sound that hover, swirl and collapse. Not a note is lost to whimsy or decoration – just sound built from pure rigour, dedication and tenderness.

Though it unlikely a reference point, Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya’s brutal and austere work came to mind, where dense atonal passages are met by the sound of slammed pianos and percussion. This is music where the weight of history feels infused in the instrument’s technology, activated and brought to life by an artist who knows how to make it sing in all its lightness, darkness and greys.