Vermooste Vløten - Crankle -1996- (LP, Self-Released), Germany

 

Vermooste Vløten were a Berlin based female duo that consisted of Hannie Bluum and Libójah Shnukki that was active during the 90's. During the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall a new spirit reconnected the divided German capital giving birth to dozens of open spaces, buildings and (temporary) venues. Squats were still around as true city institutes, rent was relatively cheap, techno started blowing up, bars with GDR retro furniture in living-room atmospheres were created and gradually a whole new generation decided to start a living in the new alternative culture capital of Europe.

Within this new scenery lots of interesting local acts started to emerge out of Berliners and newly attracted Berliners. A living-room music movement unfolded fostering both the creation of music as well as concerts that were taking place in small circles. From lo-fi indie rock to punk to cut and paste DIY songwriting to simple und Schick toy organ electronics to surf, to bedroom pop or folk, anything was possible. This was a type of music that was in synergy with daily life, city vibrations, friendships, nightly leisure and so on, not so much with an aim to play big stages or to gain a larger audience.

Vermooste Vløten was one of those amazing bands from the time. Channeling a bit of the earlier underground sounds from Berlin in the 70's and 80's and backed up by Nikki Sudden of Swell Maps as the producer they made their first album Crankle in 1996. A really nice home-made indie album full of sweet melancholic songs, a rebellious attitude, Velvet Underground and Nico infused moods and delicate experimentation. Even John Peel picked up on them at the time. 

As a female duo they stand in a great tradition of other female underground acts from Berlin, from Nina Hagen to bands like Malaria!, Carambolage or 3 Tot in the 80's to Barbara Morgenstern or Cobra Killer in the 90's. All those sounds surely even created the subconscious fertile soil for a band like 2Raumwohnung later on. In past years it has continued in the Berlin underground with acts like Die Schiefe Bahn or As Longitude. But ofcourse there are countless other female acts to mention. Let's hope it will all carry on as it should. I'm sure it will though.

Vermooste Vløten made a second album in the 90's that is equally great and has more electronic influences. Reissues? Compilations of the Berlin living-room scene? 

Something more light-hearted during these tough times....

Get it HERE

Gundel - Böse!! -198X- (Cassette, Self-Released), Germany

Here we have another obscure release from the German tape underground. Gundel was the project of the Düsseldorf based home-taper Gerrit Nowatzki. He was also in the experimental noise rock band Spalanzanis Töchter with Thomas Kallweit. Under the name Gundel Nowatzki released a couple of tapes during the second half of the 80's. You can find his other tape Macht Musik over at Tape Attack for example.

The music of Gundel on Böse!! (Angry, evil: however you want to read it) brings together an interesting combination of folk, rock and both ambient and experimental electronic sounds. Actually the quality of the recording is pretty high-standard. It seems to incorporate a certain musical dept into the release that includes some darker song-writing, piano play, flutes and other instrumental details. Maybe it's somewhat inspired by the less industrial side of Einstürzende Neubauten, but it also slighty reminds me of Circles or Strafe Für Rebellion. A sort of late 80's German sound that obtains more folk and dark ambient influences, moving away from the NDW Wahnsinn approach that was more common before. It's balancing somewhere on the thin line of writing a more serious album and home-taping experimentation.

Get it HERE

Betty Arden - Movements -1985- (Cassette, Sound On Sound), Netherlands

Betty Arden is an Amsterdam based musician and home-taper who released a couple of cassettes during the 80's. As a skilled multi-instrumentalist her musical output has been a combination of folk, new wave, minimal synth, ambient soundscapes and gloomy pop. I'm not sure whether Movements was her first release but I do know that some other cassettes came out later than this one, like her album Music for Films. In 1986 she also contributed a track to one of the mythical Oscar's X-Mas Carols compilations, which were created and compiled by Dutch music journalist and cassette expert Oscar Smit. During the 80's he wrote informative reviews about newly released cassettes for the Dutch music magazine Vinyl.

On Movements we hear great inventive and gloomy compositions (she plays all instruments by herself) quite reminiscent of the ethereal sound of groups on the 4AD label (Dead Can Dance etc.). That sound is comprised a.o. of electronic atmospheric elements, melodic acoustic guitar structures in combination with melancholic songwriting and other folk elements. It's a certain new wave sound of the 80's that was more composed in its musical approach, but also found different interesting ways of merging the atmospheric pieces with songs and composition all together on one album.

In that light Betty Arden's music also incorporates those elements, but she also shows she can be playful with her melodies and the usage of minimal synth sounds. Her compositions remind me somewhat of The Durutti Column or Deux Filles, but also of the Dutch new wave group Qua Dance I posted years ago. But ofcourse there are many examples in that musical realm.

It's always good to shed light on a female home-taper of whom we didn't hear much so far! I had to take a picture of the inner cover from a certain angle to reveal the information, because I couldn't get a right scan of that peculiar golden cover.

From the collection Allard Pierson/NPI

Get it HERE



News and message:

I'd like to take the opportunity to inform you about a few developments related to music, the blog and my own activities.

First:
Next month on May the 22nd a stunning vinyl compilation is being released by the Belgian StroomTV label that focuses on the musical output of Dutch home-taper Hessel Veldman (Y Create). I'm honored that I was asked by both the Label and Hessel Veldman to write the liner notes for this particular release. Hessel Veldman is also of great help to this blog and someone I consider as a musical mentor so I hope some of you will keep an eye on that release. Pre-orders are here: https://stroomtv.bandcamp.com/album/eigen-boezem

Second:
Next month on May the 25th another vinyl reissue will be released by the new and highly promising Futura Resistenza label. It's the first ever vinyl reissue of Jacques van Erven's Tunes & Scenery (Hard To Whistle). Van Erven is a Dutch multi-instrumentalist and artist who made this unclassifiable and incredible cassette in the 80's. Also in this case I am very honored to have written the liner notes. Definitely keep an eye on the future releases of this label too. You can pre-order your copy here: https://futuraresistenza.bandcamp.com/album/jacques-van-erven-tunes-scenery-hard-to-whistle-lp

Third:
My long time friends Oscar Olias and Matas Labašauskas from Berlin and Vilnius (creators of the Empty Brain Resort, Sucked Orange Gallery, Braille Satellite Festival and what not) have started a new label called Bigbandalone. They just released a marvelous double vinyl by the German home-taping duo Delta-Sleep-Inducing Peptide (Dieter Mauson and Siegmar Fricke) that existed during the late 80's and early 90's. These recordings show another missing link of music that was bridging the gap between the home-taping culture and the psychedelic dance-trance infusion that was rapidly seeking its way into the nervous system of the 90's. The vinyl compiles 28 tracks selected from 14 tapes. Find it here: https://www.bigbandalone.com/

Last:
Lately, by the kind grace of others, but also because of years of doing this blog I got a great opportunity to share yet more material with all of you. But because most of this material is Dutch, the overall consistency of the blog will perhaps be less varied. Ofcourse I will do the best I can to keep Archaic Inventions as international as possible in terms of content, but don't be surprised to see more Dutch tapes passing by here: I don't think it will underwhelm.

But enough with the talks. Enjoy the music! Stay safe and sane out there! - Bence AI

Al Mati - Some Shit -1981- (LP, Private Pressing), Netherlands/Portugal

Al Mati was the mysterious pseudonym project by Portuguese musician Alberto Mesquita who recorded this album in 1981 with guest appearances by Victor Enes on Guitar and Yolanda Mesquita (the voice on 'Love You Baby'). The album was privately issued here in Holland. There is nearly no information to be found about this album whatsoever but apparently the musicians were immigrants from Portugal that had settled in The Netherlands during the early 80's.

Since this record is fetching some astronomical prices online and happened to cross my path I thought it was only right to digitize it to demystify this a bit. Unlike the title "Some Shit" suggests in combination with the crazy artwork, the music on here is not too adventurous and quite average. The music consists of pretty much conventional pop music and classic 70's folk with some rock 'n roll slows by way of electronic adaptations. Musically not that special, aside from the couple of enjoyable tracks that are more intricately composed or the ones which are sang in Portuguese.

However I still think that Al Mati has its place in the world of obscure private releases and the home-recording history, specially in the Portuguese context and ofcourse even more as a Portuguese music relic issued in The Netherlands. Nevertheless it's not as interesting as the great One and Poli album on which Portuguese musician Zé Salvador participated which was issued by the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam in 1985.

Anyway, the record was a bit crackly, but I guess no other copy will surface in the near future. The music reminds me a bit of the Peter Roos album I posted before or the Venezuelan private pressing by Vinicio Adames from ages ago, although a little less weird though...

So instead of spending a fortune on a copy, just put this on during a lazy morning. And make up your own mind about its value.

(Who can direct me to some interesting Portuguese stuff from the 80's? Tape culture for example. There must be more than what I could find so far! I would appreciate it!)

Get it HERE

Mother Zosima - The Greatest Story Ever Sold -1990's- (Tape, Self-Released), US

Mother Zosima (the radical nun) was a feminist avant-folk project created by Kirsten Anderberg based on performances at Seattle (night-)clubs between 1983 and 2001. She took her name from the character Father Zosima who is one of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the story Father Zosima is some sort of guru as well as an ideal image of an orthodox Christian saint living in a monastry. He preaches for compassion and peace, basically as a reflection of Christ. During the course of the story Father Zosima dies and his holiness is called into question by the rest of the monastry because his body starts to decompose very rapidly leaving behind a terrible smell. This decomposing process is being looked upon as a sign of God prooving that Zosima was nothing but a mortal soul.

I suppose by inverting this character into Mother Zosima not only is Anderberg opposing Dostoevsky's approach of putting the man at a literary centerpoint - The "Brothers" Karamazov - as feminist critique, she is also shaping her own mirrored performative image as a radical nun that is preaching her own ideals. By choosing the title The Greatest Story Ever Sold she shows her cleverness of creating this image but also the self-irony she puts into her personification since Zosima is being looked upon as a mortal soul. And that's why this is some incredible music criticizing the American society. It is not at all stagnated into this contemporary gender and identity poltics debate we deal with nowadays, but it shows how cleverness, self-consciousness, lots of humor and appropriating commercial culture can actually serve the cause of the actual message.

The music by Mother Zosima is straight radical feminism, criticism of politics, criticism of commercial culture, criticism of weird American morals and Christianity etc. but it doesn't directly attack its enemy. It's an approach of empowering the woman, not obeying to conformism and preaches for self-empowerment while dissecting the different corrupted aspects of American society with humor and with a lot of skill. It reminds me of the feminist beat poets of the sixties like Diane Di Prima as well as some other female protest-song vocalists from the revolutionary hippie times in the States. It musically also comes close to Care of The Cow and their singer Christine Baczewska's solo work and even of certain songs by Annette Peacock. 

The songs by Mother Zosima are still so extremely relevant today. It's like nothing has ever changed. Specially when we look at this madness with Trump and the current state of the United States. To me it's really important to see how Mother Zosima's music is not some cult music stuff from the glory days of hippie hights, but music from a much later era carrying these important messages whilst not yet fallen victim to today's infinite cynical and polarised political views. We can learn from this creativity today and understand how political hyper-reality doesn't help us further by fighting it's xenophobic symptoms, but to put forward a message in a very clever package without being distracted nor doing concessions to constant exterior confirmation. This is what empowerment looks like. This is what is so deadly important about Feminism. I hope that Archaic Inventions can sometimes show the link from the past to today and provide possibilites and/or show the potentials of emancipatory power.

The Seattle scene of the 90's - aside from the birth of Grunge (an albino, a mosquito..) and stuff - was probably very very interesting and consisted of a creative diversity that was able to birth all of this legendary musical output. But yep, what a time we live in now! But we won't let our guard down. No worries. Enjoy Mother Zosima! (btw I wasn't too sure about the year of the release).

Get it HERE

Bizim Oyun Havalari ‎- Burcu Burcu Türkiye'm -198X- (Tape, Erdal Plak), Turkey

So I had this tape laying around for decades at home, but never properly gave it a listen until recently. I thought the music was typical Turkish folklore music, produced as some sort of souvenir, but it actually turned out to be one of the nicest psychedelic Turkish tapes I have yet heard.

Turkish folklore music is usually acoustic and obviously covering traditionals, often also quite hard to distinguish from each other. This tape too is a lengthy mix-up of all kind of similar traditional Turkish songs and melodies, but the key lies in the fact that the whole thing is electrified with the electro-saz (electric bağlama) as well as with keyboards that were manufactured in the 80's. The music is easily to be put in line with the sounds of older Turkish and Anatolian psychedelic music like Selda, Erkin Koray or Edip Akbayram in which the use of electric instruments took over from the acoustic predecessors. A bit like what Miles Davis did in Jazz at a certain moment.

The music on Burcu Burcu Türkiye'm could very well be the summer soundtrack of you moving forward in an ever-lasting trans-orient-express while its engine driver and yourself are spacing out on a fair amount of hashish and opium discussing Rumi's poetry. You're flying through the Turkish countryside after a magical woman has just red your future in the coffee ground while you're solving the mysteries of the Nazar. It could be this.

But aside from that, the music is also creating a similar atmosphere as contemporary artists like the Syrian musician Omar Souleyman or the Sahrawi psych-force Group Doueh from the Western Sahara. Obviously these are different geographical regions, but they are somewhat musically connected in their use of the endless repetitive psychedelic oriental sounds inducing their trance.

The tape is unindexed which seemed a better choice. Specially the B-Side is a psychedelic treat! Enjoy the trip!

Get it HERE

Calliope Quartet - Incognita -1998- (Cassette, Crossroads Records), Hungary

Calliope Quartet was a short-lived Hungarian Jazz-Rock and experimental folk outfit that consisted of Molnár Tamás on bass, Pásztohy Bálint on drums, Hűvösvölgyi Péter on guitar and Bonyár Judit on cello and vocals. They released this one cassette only album on the Hungarian Crossroads Records. A label that tried to merge the genres of folk, jazz and world music with the contemporary sounds of the nineties.

Incognita that was recorded in 1997 is a stunning album balancing somewhere on the crossroads of rock in opposition, jazz-rock and even hinting towards Hungarian folk music at times. Within a Hungarian context they probably come closest to the RIO group Kampec Dolores, known for their combination of avant-rock, folk and improvisation. The tracks on Incognita are quite lengthy and leave lots of room for the listener to enter the musical world of the band. The tracks have nice abstract and sometimes humoristic titles like Aszimmetrikus Fémbuborék (Asymmetrical Metal Bubble) or Jelmezbál Jazzsznoboknak (Costume Ball For Jazz Snobs). The band plays great quality music, but doesn't lose its approach to have fun while playing. Also they don't portray themselves as academic jazz musicians. 

This is actually a great album from Hungary and already nearly impossible to find after just two decades that have passed. Clearly there is some Zappa influence going on, but it also reminds me of 70's French Zeuhl band ZAO or of Italian jazz-rock group Perigeo from the 70's or of the Ethno-Krautrock sound of Embryo or... should I keep it going?!

Excellent avant-jazz-rock from the East of Europe! 

Get it HERE

Yasui Kazumi (安井かずみ) - 空にいちばん近い悲しみ -1971- (LP, Philips), Japan

*Archaic Inventions 5 years anniversary post!*

Yasui Kazumi (安井かずみ) aka ZUZU was a known Japanese essayist, fashion model and poetess from Yokohama. At a young age she started to translate and write poetry, learn French and write many songs. In 1970 and 1971 she released two records through Polydor and Philips. Her first album "ZUZU" was named after her own nickname and was a classic japanese female pop, bossa nova, enka album that was quite chic but still also quite traditional. One of those tracks got compiled on the excellent Nippon Girls compilation series.

In 1971 she released the album 空にいちばん近い悲しみ (Sora Ni Ichiban Chikai Kanashimi) meaning something like The sadness closest to the sky. This album featured an overview of her poetic work on top of a variety of musical theme's: from a French chanson style to hippie-esque fuzz jams. Even though I cannot understand Japanese, it's clear how she gives an insight in her mind through poetry while being indulged in a life of decadent travels, fashion, hippies, melancholy and isolation. Sora Ni Ichiban Chikai Kanashimi was also published as a book aimed at girls and apparently she decided to adopt it in a musical format the same year.

The book was illustrated by the famous Japanese graphic artist Aquirax Uno who was also related to the psychedelic and tripped out theater group Tenjo Sajiki. He was known for his utterly psychedelic erotic and surrealistic drawings that are to be found all over Japan's hippie scene from the early seventies as a visual trademark. He also did many posters for experimental film. 

By the late sixties Kazumi had married a businessman in Rome and divorced a year later in New York. Just a few years later she found herself already in Paris and returned to Japan in 1971. On the album it's clear that she was travelling a lot and lived a cosmopolitan life. There is the Arc de Triomphe on the inner sleeve and many musical signs of Paris. Other places that are mentioned are India, California and New York where she probably was also finding her way into hippie scenes as well as celebrity insanity. Check out a translation of the tracklist:

The sadness closest to the sky
Voice comfort
Seaside dialogue
Young people's notes
For example, likes and dislikes
Five people in one person
Love in a beautiful city · · · white water drops in the morning
Wind
Returning from India - New York 29, April - Light of St. Moritz - Spring in California
Deauville's determination

Still you can find a lot of melancholy on this album that she displays poetically in her fragility and theme's. Kazumi died in 1994 after becoming quite famous in Japan. Most interesting is this part of her music and life when she was merging a decadent life with a hippie mind and created this beautiful concept album that catches a certain time, lifestyle and the feeling of being far from home coming from another culture. Even though I don't speak Japanese I can still kind of appreciate it. Sometimes she namedrops something from popular culture like Rosemary's Baby. It gives me a bit of a Gainsbourg and Jane Birking feeling, but also hints towards other Japanese singers or music like Harumi. 

Anyone that knows Japanese or more about ZUZU should feel free to add some information in the comments. Also I have an original book copy of The sadness closest to the sky for sale, since most of it is just Japanese verse with a few Aquirax Uno drawings and I cannot read it. I included all the interesting scans and pictures in the file and video below. Write me in the comments if you would like to get the book. The rip is from a 90's CD, although it was originally released on vinyl in 1971. Here's a nice crooked poetry translation excerpt to end this with: 

I am getting tired of being deeply rooted now, trying to think that I am improving after thinking about everything and thinking that it is wonderful.

I do not have the time to think about someone who I do not know, I feel so tired anyway.

It's really sad, the more I want to have fun, the more sad the depression is.
 
I wonder if that is the closest thing to the sky

Get it HERE

Care Of The Cow - Dogs' Ears Are Stupid -1983- (Cassette, Fame & Fortune Records), US

This is the first time that I post a tape that I didn't digitize myself and that wasn't donated to the blog. Lately I've been doing a lot of late-night searches into inactive blogs and other platforms to map obscure material that was posted on the web these last ten years but that got lost again (remember when your external hard drive crashed?). Some of this hard to find material I'm uploading to Youtube (for the time being, I'm not a fan).

This cassette that I found on Care Of The Cow's own webpage has little to do with what I wrote above, just thought that it needs more attention!

Care Of The Cow was formed in Chicago in 1974 by Christine Baczewska, Victor Sanders, Sher Doruff and Kevin Clark. From 1974-1984 Baczewska, Sanders and Doruff produced an album “I Still Don’t Know your Style” (1981) and an album length cassette Dog’s Ears Are Stupid (1983). There are many live recordings and an promo LP from 1975.

The album I Still Don't Know Your Style captured COTC's amazing eclectic musical style. With their psychedelic folk, art-rock, strange manipulations and collages with humouristic lyrics COTC remains one of those well kept secrets from Chicago's 70's and 80's underground. Some people remember them from festivals in the mid-sevnties and some remember them from a later period in the eighties. Nevertheless their music lacks attention from listeners, since it's musically too unclassifiable for many.

COTC's even more hidden cassette Dogs' Ears Are Stupid collects some other sounds than you would expect. Apparently the band began to experiment with synthesizers and drum machines in the eighties and started to poor their experimental folk-rock music into minimal synth depths. They managed to achieve their musical warmth in a cold way. A great way only real groovy people that were active in seventies could crossover with into the eighties (Daevid Allen could be another example)  What a gem! I think the track European Trains has some of the best minimal synth potential of the album, while the folk elements are still there.

Care Of The Cow ceased to exist by the mid-eighties and the members allegedly got scattered over the US and Europe. The singer Christine Baczewska released a compilation CD in 1993. Maybe someone knows more.

Highy Recommended!

Get it HERE

Gloria Martín - Gloria Martín -1971- (LP, Philips), Venezuela

 *Archaic Inventions 1 year anniversary post!*

To me this self-titled record of Venezuelan singer Gloria Martín is the absolute Holy Grail of all Venezuelan records. Actually Martín wasn’t born in Venezuela, but in Madrid and moved to Venezuela with her parents when she was nine years old. So she basically became Venezuelan. She studied philosophy and letters at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), she graduated in Arts and got a Ph.D. in cultural history.  At the same time she started a career as a singer and in Venezuela she’s mainly remembered for her Nueva Canción music. Nueva Canción was a typicial left-wing orientated musical style from Latin America (and Spain) addressing social problems in the society, usually songs on acoustic guitar highly influenced by the revolution in Cuba. Moreover it was a genre which tried to define the own identity of Latin American countries without being defined by colonialism, neo-colonialism or American influences. In Venezuela the Nueva Canción protest music was very much connected to student movements in Caracas of the sixties and seventies. Other representatives in Venezuela were people like Alí Primera, Soledad Bravo and Xulio Formoso. Gloria Martín also wrote a book about Nueva Canción in Venezuela in 1998 entitled “El perfume de una época (la Nueva Canción en Venezuela)” which I’d love to have to be able to tell more about this movement. Here you can at least find a very interesting article in Spanish about Gloria Martín and her role in the Nueva Canción Venezolana. 

But this record is not one of Gloria Martín’s acoustic singer-songwriter protest albums. It’s more of an artistic showcase and does reflect the social environment, but doesn’t involve too much politics. This was an orchestrated musical masterpiece and so many years later it surprisingly shows that everything rightly got together at the moment when that recording was made. Sometimes cultural history gets captured in a recording that reflects the essence of a certain moment: true artistic pearls that are the perfect product of their time in every sense.

Paz

The compositions of the orchestra led by Venezuelan arranger Jesús Chucho Sanoja cover all the best musical styles from the early seventies and at the same time create the most amazing conditions for the beautiful voice of Gloria Martín. She was 26 years old at the time she recorded this album full of poetical beauty. Also she wrote all the lyrics herself. The album contains orchestral arrangements, jazz, bossa nova, collage, sound-effects, folk, early seventies rock influences and everything in between. It’s a highly sophisticated record that merges all the nostalgic beauty of Venezuela in the very early seventies (when people were still Damas y Caballeros) with student revolt, impressionistic decadence, sensuality, poetry and intellectualism. Considering all these dimensions, you have to be a really refined soul to be able to comply and apply these things as a youthful person going through university and at the same time being an artist. Conceptually, the album has a lot in common with certain progressive orchestrated music made for singers with studio effects and studio revisions like Serge Gainsbourg’s and Jean-Claude Vannier’s Histoire de melody Nelson (even length-wise!), but then in a Latin American context.

The main highlight of the album is the B-Side which starts after songs like “El hombre aquel” dedicated to Ché Guevara, the song “At the other side of the sea” sung in touching broken English and a bossa nova song sung in Portuguese. It kicks off with an ode to the Universidad Central de Venezuela called “Ciudad Universitaria”. The title reflects Gloria Martín’s passionate relation to her university and its social importance for her city Caracas. The lyrics are as important right now as if they were back then. They describe the paradoxical feeling of attachment  to Caracas with its beauty and danger, because of words like “Ay mi ciudad, quién ha puesto detrás cada flor un policía?” which is accompanied by studio effects creating police alarms to intensify the lyrics. Apparently that song used to be censored during the seventies, because students adopted it as a form of social critique. The song itself is full of energy and shows some of the most groovy rare groove jazz ever to come out of Venezuela. The next song “Mi dulce amigo” is a song that should have been on some Jazzanova groove-jazz compilation of old killer tracks and is an absolute masterpiece. Next is an impressionistic decadent song called “Que facil es” which expresses what goes on in the dreamy mind of a young woman and her gentle diffuse thoughts when she’s under a spell of someone. These three songs make up that part of the album which elevates it into something of unique quality and emotion. “Si puedes” is accompanied by Venezuelan Santana-like psych band La Fe Perdida that also released some singles through Philips in the early seventies: like this one and this one. A core element which is to be found throughout the whole album is the melancholy which makes it strong, it doesn’t glorify the interior nor exterior life and it’s truthful, it might also be because of her deep voice; Grace Slick like. The lyrics of each song are to be found on the inner part of the sleeve. Gloria Martín once described her song writing as:

“Para hacer una canción lo que se necesita es decir algo, tener sensibilidad ante una cosa determinada y también experiencias instantáneas o de toda la vida”. “No considero mis canciones como un éxito, sino como un conjunto de las cosas que yo siento y deseo que lleguen al corazón de la gente”.

The cover of the album looks amazing. Somehow, although not much is to be seen, one can immediately detect Venezuela in that cover. There is a graphic design idea with the rotation of the rectangle and the colours, the design on the tablet on the background and of course Gloria herself with the most amazing groovy seventies haircut and peace-sign necklace. Those elements feel really Venezuelan if you have some insight in the arts during mid-twentieth century Venezuela and mainly Caracas. The inner part of the sleeve shows Gloria in the studio and you get an idea of the left-wing intellectual groovy girl that she was.

It might look as if I glorify this album too much, but I am really touched by this piece of art and see another hidden dimension why to share this. Even more so since I visited Venezuela and could see the fossils of artistic beauty in Caracas covered in the damage of the modern condition and the neglecting of the past in the modern society. National conflicts have created a situation where people mainly want to consolidate what they benefit from the most in their particular social context and history sometimes gets manipulated to let certain political views benefit from it. Reflection on marginal artistic expressions from the past with value for cultural heritage are a lot of times viewed as a divergence from progressive developments of a modern society based on the physical evidence of wealth. A kind of regime of wealth-symbolism rules and values connected to material profit and the consolidation of social class are part of the primary dimension of how people on a short term deal with the current social struggle. I get that arts as such are of course wholly secondary when social problems raise through the roof, so basic needs for a society should be consolidated first. Still I think that precisely a struggle so critical in combination with modern indifference can cause losses for culture and history. Through those dimensions people can feel connected to each other, shape their history, have their imagination aroused and maybe even find “new old” premises to bridge the political gap. Even when art, like a left-wing protest song, is coloured by a clear political preference it still can be perceived more lightly and political conditions change throughout history. Moreover the intellectual core of people who have created this music and had been connected to student movements had a less uncompromised way of shaping their political views and were also fighting for their rights against an oppressive government during Venezuela’s seventies. So back then a left-wing orientated political philosophy also had an emancipatory dimension to it. 

Nowadays politics is like growing up in religion: it exacerbates forming own opinions, because there exists no initiation of the self with the religious values.  But a change is perceivable and people are very engaged with their arts and culture. It seems that everybody knows some national cultural expression which contributes to the beauty of the country, but many things keep being scattered and fragmented in the memories of individuals and don’t find the right path to the public. In my opinion the conservation of cultural expression can for example create political plurality, but also shows something which can shape identity and have people connect to each other. At least people can learn from these individual artists how much one can extract from her/himself without being a product of commerce, excess or machismo which would already be positive no matter what political colour.

The upload of this album, made available for the first time after 43 years (not to be found on the web, I can barely believe it), is for everyone in Venezuela and the world. It has never been sold on Ebay, nor Discogs. Gloria Martín still lives and people have to re-release this album. Make it happen. This is a musical and cultural jewel. This is the definition of essential. Gracias a Gloria Martín y gracias a Venezuela! El disco es cultura!

Highly Recommended!

Get it HERE

 

Full album on Youtube

Other Gloria Martín albums here:

1969: Lo nuestro es cantar (Single)

1973: Si se calla el cantor (con Mercedes Sosa)

1974: Mi riqueza es la alegría

1976: Volverán

1976: Para este país. Cantos de lucha de Venezuela

Another article on Gloria Martín: Pensando en Gloria Martín

 

More Venezuelan obscurities are to be found on this music channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ScratchedLP