IRON ZION / IRUN ZION

At the entrance of the Tuff Gong studios in Jamaica, I came across the same mural every day: “IRON ZION”. Each day, I imagined that same mural transformed with the name of my city on it: “IRUN ZION”.

IRON: metal and also strong, solid, stable, settled, robust. Iron is also a Basque noun meaning appropriate, propitious, advantageous.

IRUN: The city ( Hiria), metropolis, but also to spin, spinning/ linking, and endure, subsist, remain, continue. Historically, a place where different routes converge.

ZION: A concept that in the cosmovision (world view) of reggae music is used in a geo-symbolic way to define the holy land and the earthly paradise, but it is also used to define a concrete territory: the African continent. According to different interpretations, the Earth would be Zion. To destroy Babylon or the system that generates man for man slavery and to construct Zion, a fair world. Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights.

DUB: “ To construct, the DUB deconstructivism” I sang in “ Baxua eta Lurra” ( The Bass and the Earth). In Bass-que Culture, I gathered the testimony of the meeting between the Bass Culture, the creative universe of hypnotic and organic sounds of reggae, and the “ Basque” culture, the Basque identity. Always surviving by being rebellious. Rebel music. And DUB, the instrumental activity of systematic destructuring, the unprejudiced process of musical deconstruction. Sonic cubism. A free land for the meeting. Point of concurrence.

IRON LION ZION: Bob Marley’s call to uprising.

IRUN LION ZION in DUB: Irun the connection. At its crossroad, the liberated territory of DUB music where a variety of creators meet.

“Listen to the Asthmatic Lion”
Asthmatic Lion Sound System