Album Notes

The refined nectar distilled by Malpaís has nothing to do with some sort of academic exercise, nor with simplified folkloric compilations. We are face to face with something new and yet at the same time ancestral, hence the great and sudden popularity of their music.

Fidel Gamboa, Malpaís' vocalist and songwriter, comes from a family with several generations of Guanacastecan singers and songwriters, including Adán Guevara Centeno and Max Goldemberg. His songs reflect the Creole, Mestizo and Mesoamerican tradition from which several themes in this CD are derived: “La Vieja”, “Mazurca de Dámaso”, “Presagio” and the very beautiful “Más al norte del recuerdo”.

Historias de Nadie is consequently an event, preceded by a year of thunderous concerts such as the series of “jams” at the "Antigua Aduana" (old customs house) in the Costa Rican capital city, San José, where thousands of spectators gathered together to make a handful of memorable songs their own.

This new songs, in Malpaís’ second album, will soon also be passed from mouth to mouth. These are songs of farewell and absence in which Guanacaste is a metaphor for any corner of the world where “dreams are lost” (“se van perdiendo los sueños”). As the last refrain of “Más al norte del recuerdo” leaves off: “Over there, by the stand of sweet acacia, dreams are lost, over there far away and it never seems we will arrive… the wind no longer sings of Guanacaste, it's there no more; I have to look farther North of the memory…”.

Please, play that again.