Milestones

Enrique Morente

Name: Enrique Morente – Omega
Item: Omega
Author: Michele Corrado

Omega

1996 (El europeo)

avant-rock, nuevo flamenco

by Michele Corrado

There are records that open, and leave open, doors through which it's then impossible to predict what will come in. In the case of flamenco, one of the records that has had this function is “La leyenda del tiempo” by Camarón de la Isla, a work dated 1979 with which the Andalusian singer, amid general skepticism, brought the gypsy genre closer to rock. Towards contemporaneity, then, and towards contamination.

Released seventeen years later, “Omega” by Granada-born Enrique Morente can be considered the extreme consequence of Camarón's gesture, alongside whom he sits among the highest ranks of the so-called nuevo flamenco.

When Morente, already fifty-four and universally regarded as one of the genre's most important figures, decided to bring an alternative rock band into the making of his defining album, he had a very specific reason for doing so. The musician did not share the view of many – who would inevitably turn up their noses – that flamenco is a museum piece. For him, flamenco is living, ever-changing material. It's therefore only natural for it to meet the most visceral sounds of the present day, in this case the influences post-punk and noise of fellow Granada natives Lagartija Nick – a band as obsessed with the darkness of Bauhaus e Swans as with the noise trails of Sonic Youth.

The band led by Antonio Arias is tasked with creating the sound and its soundscapes on six of the thirteen tracks on the album. For the remaining seven, the singer-songwriter instead brings in the crème of flamenco from that era, along with his most prestigious longtime collaborators. The roster of names printed on the album cover is indeed imposing: Vicente Amigo, Canizares, Tomatito, Montoyita, El Paquete, Isidro Munoz, M. A. Cortez, J. A. Salazar. Not credited on the cover, but rounding out the lineup, is also Estrella Morente, Enrique's daughter, who, only fifteen at the time, contributed some precious and promising vocal parts.

One of the most incredible aspects of “Omega” lies in the way Morente managed to organize, with coherence and cohesion, the alternation between the new and the classic, as well as the coexistence of the two elements, when they cold-fuse in the record's most revolutionary moments. Needless to say, such a result would not have been possible if guitarists as iconic to the genre as Amigo, Tomatito and Canizares had not believed in Morente's vision. That much insight on the part of the talents involved was not as much of a given as it might seem today.

Among the many things "Omega" and "La leyenda del tiempo" have in common is their authors' shared obsession with the poetry of Federico García Lorca. But while Camarón drew solely on the Andalusian poet's lyrics, Morente paired them with Spanish translations of the verses of Leonard Cohen, creating a pairing that seemed as risky on paper as it proved successful and evocative in practice. The subtitle along the bottom edge of the "Omega" cover reads "Cantando a Federico García Lorca y Leonard Cohen", an association that of course drew further criticism, but which actually reinforced the concept underpinning "Omega", echoing on a lyrical level the same operation carried out musically: the proposal of an open, ever-shifting flamenco, free of any barriers.

They had an ocean between them, but Enrique Morente, García Lorca and Leonard Cohen shared ghosts and inspirations, an obsession with faith, desire and death, as well as a deep use of symbolism as the lifeblood of their work. In truth, this isn't even an association invented from scratch by Morente. The Canadian songwriter has always been a devoted admirer of Lorca's work, to the point not only of citing him as one of his main poetic influences, but even naming his daughter Lorca Cohen.

It's no coincidence, then, that Morente's main Lorca-related source is "Poeta en Nueva York", the poet's darkest and most enigmatic work. Published posthumously in 1940, the collection of verses was written by García Lorca between 1929 and 1930, during his stay in New York. There, in the American economic capital, the poet observed from his privileged position as an intellectual the unraveling of society under the blows of the Great Depression. The ghosts of this decay haunt his darkest, most cryptic and psychedelic poems.

If the Lorca-derived source material of “Omega” is almost singular, the Cohen songs quoted are inevitably numerous: “Hallelujah”, “The Gypsy's Wife”, “First We Take Manhattan” and of course “Take This Waltz”, Cohen's own translation of Lorca's “Pequeno vals vienes”.

In any case, these are never mere covers or slavish quotations. Enrique Morente extracts, blends and reiterates citations from the two authors to give them new, dark life. The same happens with the traditional flamenco palos (standards), which are reworked and assembled according to the needs of each piece.

The power of the sound built with Lagartija Nick, and the evocative force and complexity of the whole operation, are already clear from “Omega (Poema para los muertos)”, the ten-minute suite that opens the record. Morente's flamenco singing is theatrical, almost liturgical, staging the urban apocalypse sketched by Lorca's tragic words over noise-streaked guitar, though the fusion of the two worlds takes a few minutes to arrive. It's Eric Jimenez's drumming (he would join Los Planetas the following year) that finally breaks the barrier, kicking off a crescendo that spills into rapture when an incessant clacking of castanets fuels a buzzsaw of electric guitars.

Next comes “Pequeño vals vienés”, i.e. Leonard Cohen's “Take This Waltz”, which returns to the Lorca original through a tortured adaptation of flamenco tangos to rock song form.

Made with El Paquete and Juan Antonio Salazar, “Solo del pastor bobo” briefly moves the work away from New York and into the bucolic Andalusian landscapes of Lorca's tragedies, where the simplest characters, like the foolish shepherd, were entrusted with ancestral truths. The approach here is more classical, and amid castanets and guitar, Morente's voice delivers a passionate song reminiscent of the so-called bulería, one of the most typical flamenco palos.

These settings and this approach to flamenco material return in other tracks, especially those accompanied by Isidro Munoz's classical guitar (“Adan”, “Vals en las ramas” and “Norma y paraiso de los negros”), but also in the poignant seguiriya (one of the oldest palos) of “La aurora de Nueva York”, in which Morente stretches his singing towards the sky, his raspy voice surrounded by castanets and flamenco jazz touches courtesy of Vicente Amigo. It's in this track and in “Sacerdotes”, Lorca's reflection on the mechanical repetitiveness of priestly rituals, that flamenco's inevitable and fascinating Arabic influences emerge most forcefully.

Thanks obviously to the nature of the Cohen classic, “Manhattan (First We Take Manhattan)” is the most muscular track of the bunch. Enrique and Estrella Morente duet in a powerful flamenco over an alternative-rock scaffolding, amid hypnotic drum patterns and blankets of distortion. The most extraordinary part of the song is the marriage between Lagartija Nick's electric guitars and the romantic flourishes of Canizares' flamenco guitar, a magical collision between two distant universes charged with the same intensity. An even more radical transformation befalls the timeless Cohen prayer “Hallelujah”, rendered by Morente as “Aleluya”, which keeps only the chorus from the original, entrusted to a female choir and Lagartija Nick's fuzz, while the rest is transformed by Morente and Vicente Amigo into a harrowing flamenco lament.

Rock injections also characterize “Nina ahogada en el pozo (Granada Y Newburg)”, among the most dramatic and grim tracks of the set, weaving together horrifying visions of infant death, plucked guitars, distortion and interlocking drums and castanets. “Vuelta de paseo”, on the other hand, opens as one of the most classic seguiriyas, until Lagartija Nick unleash one of their most violent rock assaults. In this pandemonium of electric guitars and blazing drums, Canizares' classical guitar performs rapid circus acrobatics, and Morente's panting interjections complete the record's psychedelic peak.

“Omega” has an ending as shocking as its beginning. Even though by the end of the journey one has fully grasped the sound woven by Morente and Lagartija Nick, the power of Lorca's verses proclaimed in “Ciudad sin sueno” leaves you disarmed. “No duerme nadie” the flamenco bard repeats incessantly, amid arabesques of electric guitars and castanets so fast they seem to buzz. The sleepless metropolis warps men, children and animals, swallowing them into a mincer of electric guitars. Also remarkable, in the record's conclusion, is the overdubbing work on Morente's melismatic singing and on the verses, recited by the singer ever more rapidly and confusedly, until a dizzying effect is created.

It's a universal, living flamenco, one that collides seemingly irreconcilable musical worlds, from Granada to New York, from Federico García Lorca to Leonard Cohen, that seethes darkly within “Omega”. Among the forays attempted by flamenco's greats into rock up to that point, this is without doubt the most extreme.

(Revised by Federico Romagnoli)

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08/03/2026

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Michele Corrado, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition