Just as the waves of the sea mold the cliffs of the Basque coast, the music of Félix Ibarrondo emerges chiseled in primal sounds. His work mirrors the momentum and passion of a sincere and vital temperament: Northern. His aesthetics get born as an allegory of nature and combines introspection with vehemence and determination without ambiguity. A powerful and sweeping rhythmic feeling articulates the speech of the composer, stripped of the accessory of the artifices, to distil the essentials. The ancestral roots of Iberian culture arise in a “bruitist” primitivism that flows in the context of a refined timbral sensitivity. This expressive grammar, with beautiful contrasts and accents (like the language of Euskal Herria), confers an unmistakable stamp to his production, away from fashions or schools.

When reading a score of the oñatiarra his extraordinary technique is distinguished for being able to translate the phrasing the same way a conductor feels the musical gesture. This peculiarity indicates a very precise inner listening of the author and an effectiveness in his writing portentously grounded (it does not seem accidental to have grown up in a family where conductors abound). The harmonic, timbre, metric and agogic modulations in his works respond to an absolutely organic and instinctive conception of the striations of time, as it happens in the proportions of vegetables or in the fractal growth of mountain chains and rivers or in erosion patterns of rocks. Thus, emotion and technique are mysteriously overlapped and, in Ibarrondo's words, "they transcend any analysis, any explanation, and consequently, they make art what it is. That inexplicable thing was already necessary for the prehistoric human beings. That inexplicable thing makes our existence more meaningful and, at times, it relieves the difficulties of being."

                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Nacho de Paz