Mikel Urdangarin was born in Amorebieta (Vizcaya; Spain) in 1971.  He has been perhaps the most prolific of the new generation of Basque singer-songwriters (cantautores).  His first album, Haitzetan (On the High Rocks; 1997), was a minimalist mixture of voice, guitar, and cello.  Badira hiru aste (It’s Been Three Weeks; 1998), with a broadened range of instrumentation, was the result of an extended stay in Scotland.  Espilue (The Mirror) in 2000 brought him to a wider public; it was the best-selling disc at that year’s Durango Book Fair.  His subsequent work, Bar Puerto (2001), in collaboration with the poet Kirmen Uribe and the violinist Bingen Mendizabal, was the musical documentation of a multimedia project.  Urdangarin’s 2002 Heldu artean (Until We Get There), a tribute to friendship, was an investigation into other musical languages (and into Catalán, in one of the songs).  In 2003, at the request of Basque public television, Urdangarin produced a DVD collage of past work, called Lagun artean (Among Friends), with multiple musician-friends at a farmhouse in the Basque countryside.  A trip to New York in spring 2003 led to his collaboration on the trilingual Zaharregia, txikiegia agian / Una manera de mirar / Too Old, Too Small, Maybe.

Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/writersintranslation/magazineofliteratureintranslat/basquecountry/mikelurdangarin/