" Elurretan (on the snow), was to be the music to an image - Brueghel the Elder's Hunters on the Snow. I wanted to portray this vast whiteness, beautiful and difficult, funny and rough. Afterwards, many other images were superimposed: the delicate prints of Hiroshige, translucent canvases of Monet, a solitary walk in the middle of winter in the English garden of Munich - the particular sound of this landscape, which drowns out the distant sounds and makes the nearest ones dry, hides a certain violence.

The title of the first movement, Mara-mara, is a Basque onomatopoeia that describes the gentle, copious flow of snow. We hear a descent of small particles, punctuated by increasingly rhythmic attacks. I wanted to look at the snowflakes from far and near simultaneously; to oppose the soft aspect of a snowy hill to the sharp and geometrical profile of each snowflake, comparable to a tiny and unique weapon, an indispensable gear of the cold machine.

The second movement, Irrist, contains almost nothing but slides, linking in my imagination to a skating rink. It is, of course, a playful movement (guitar and mandolin ping-pong the notes of a common line), but through the intensification of the gestures, I wanted to bring out a certain annoyance; an exasperation that reveals the dramatic tendency of chamber music.

Dardar, tremblement, renders a sensation of coldness through a constant tremolo, a vibration of the air close to a vision or a mirage - like that of the little girl with matches. The apparition is not long in coming: Ravel's melody on a poem by Marat, D'Anne qui me jecta de la neige, runs through the whole movement in filigree.

Elurretan is also an extension of an earlier piece for guitar and electronics, Belarretan (on the grass), which explored what music might sound like in Titian's Country Concert. While electronics opened the door to unlimited deployment of guitar sounds, in Elurretan I had to bring the ideas to life within the framework of the instrumental possibilities, which I expanded through an exploratory approach - and deliberately impoverished through a repetitive and unmixed presentation of the elements. Perhaps I am inspired by what is paradoxical about snow: a monotony that comes from the repetition of unique and precious objects." - Mikel Urquiza