The Barcelona-based label Nøvak has released the first album/compilation of Mecánica Divina, one of the side projects of GG Quintanilla together with Andeka Larrea and Sebastià Jovani. In La Mansión de los héroes, we find almost all the songs recorded by this band, whose interrupted career lasted from 2008 to 2017. More of an artistic and political project than a traditional band, here we can find the musical side of Mecánica Divina. There are twenty compositions with influences from industrial and experimental music and this material that will please our more adventurous readers. This is the first time that this band’s work has been published.
The discourse of the “band” was oriented towards “the apology of industrial ruin and the memory of the industrial urban landscape”. A year before Mecánica Divina was formed, the two original members, Andeka and Quintanilla, published a book. Bilbao y su doble: ¿Regeneración urbana o destrucción de la vida pública? (Urban regeneration or destruction of public life?) and the first compositions of the project were born to accompany the work.
Influences of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire and texts by Leopoldo M. Panero, Artaud or Baudelaire, shaped the first proposals of Mecánica Divina. The first concert as a band was in October 2008 at the Bilboloop festival, which was followed by other performances in Spain. In 2009, they played a series of three small concerts in which they used an unpublished book by the poet Txus Conde to compose songs. One of the concerts was attended by Sebastiá Jovani, who would eventually join the band. Mecánica Divina would take a break until 2017, the centenary of the Russian revolution, which served as the reason for the band’s return. Thus, renamed Mecanica Divina 1917, they created a six-piece show in which they portrayed the period from 1917 to the death of Stalin and the results of the revolution.
If after this journey into an unknown but exciting past you want to know what GG Quitanilla has been up to in recent years, you can listen to Mocematic, his peculiar tribute to the famous Spanish band Mocedades, also published by Nøvak. Ten of their songs taken through the filter of John Foxx‘s Metamatic.
