Pau Riba - Jo, La Donya I El Gripau Pau Riba

As a follow-up to our previous work reissuing the recordings of Pau Riba, key figure in Catalonia's counter-culture and music scene, Munster now presents "Jo, la donya i el gripau" (1971). Released just a couple of years after his revered "Dioptria", this remarkable work is regarded as one of the earliest D.I.Y. albums in the history of Spanish pop music.

At the time, Riba was only 23 years old. Escaping an increasingly hostile Barcelona, Riba and his partner, Mercè Pastor, moved to Formentera, where they would spend the next four years. The album was conceived during this period of "hippie" living. As they became part of a growing community of young people drawn to the island by a new, nature-centered way of life-completely different from that of the tourists who also visited Formentera-they also discovered LSD. Playing and singing under the influence of acid opened the door to an entirely new creative universe.

When Riba returned to Barcelona, the ideas he had originally developed for the follow-up to "Dioptria" before moving to Formentera were completely abandoned, and the project evolved into something altogether different. The album was recorded in Formentera using two battery-powered film sound recorders-a Revox and a Nagra- in order to capture every nuance of the island's idyllic surroundings.

The result was "Jo, la donya i el gripau", an extraordinary psychedelic folk album that not only celebrated Riba's life with his partner Mercè-the donya-and the birth of their son Pauet-the gripau-but can also be understood as the concluding chapter of a trilogy whose first two installments were the two volumes of "Dioptria".

An essential album.