No photograph of their faces survives. They came with welding masks and did not take them off at any point, not even for the official portrait; the photographer notes it on the record. They played a borrowed organ from the bar, a drum machine and a toy keyboard, and they sounded like nothing else on this side of the border. Nobody in the village ever identified them. Two years after the contest closed, a tape arrived at the town hall with no note and no sender, and it has been added to the later holdings.
Tape with no sender
LGB-ANX/001 · later holdings · provenance
LGB-ANX/006 · video · 2026
Beste Aldea — Ez gara hemengoak
Fifteen seconds assembled from four photographs in the holdings. There is no mouth anywhere in the piece: the welding masks are never lifted, and the voice that says the two lines goes through a vocoder. The movements keep a fixed rate, as if a machine were setting it.
LGB-ANX/011 · video · 2026
Beste Aldea — The tape
Forty-one seconds cut from twelve photographs in the holdings, over the unaddressed tape of LGB-ANX/001. It lasts exactly as long as the tape does and it ends where the tape ends: mid-bar, with no fade. Only three of the twelve are of the band; the rest are the audience and the street, people who happened to be there and to whom nothing was ever attributed. This is not 1981 material.
LGB-ANX/012 · video · 2026
Beste Aldea — Inor ez da jaisten
A hundred seconds: the whole song, of which the tape in the later holdings preserved only the first forty-two. Reconstructed from twenty-seven photographs. In the first half nobody comes down to the ground; in the second, what fails is no longer the people but the one looking, and the piece carries out one by one the notes the photographer wrote on the back: the counter reading 38 of 36, the photograph he does not remember taking, the flash he ran out of, the hour he stops writing down. Colour leaks in twice before it takes everything. This is not 1981 material.
