It’s a bit perverse really, when it requires a computer and some state of the art recording technology to time shift us back to the days of tinny-sounding transistor radios, the space race and minis (driven or worn…) But that’s really what Colombian instrumental trio Los Pirañas have effortlessly conveyed in the span of their three album/ten year history. A form of retro-futurism based on many years of this trio enthusiastically embracing music from their own backyard like Cumbia and Champeta and those from nearby neighbours such as Tropicalia and Salsa.

And naturally, since originally meeting in high school, guitarist Eblis Alvarez (also a Meridian Brother), bassist Mario Galeano and drummer Pedro Ojeda wouldn’t be the fervent musicologists they are without casting their collective gaze westwards to shoehorn elements of psychedelia, modern jazz and minimalist dub-scaping into their ever expanding universe. Any novelty aspects that this somewhat unusual marriage of genres is quickly dispelled with this live recording. It’s pretty apparent from the onset that there’s a full scale guitar jamboree taking place in front of us. Out goes the fancy dan fret-boarding and in comes umpteen shades of rhythmic invention and a wide spectrum of tonal colours, bolstered by the aforementioned presence of sundry items of digital tech. All the while, the mazy runs and ultra-tricksy manoeuvres of “Historia…” finds the trio sticking to each other like limpets wearing Velcro suits. With reverb in excess, space has to be the inevitable destination for “Llanero Soledeño”. Here Pedro’s multi-directional pot’n’pans rattle-a-thon being much like an impromptu session from the kitchen area of Joe Meek’s studio set-up. Being redolent of indigenous folk themes, meanwhile, “Todos Tenemos Hogar” is perhaps the most traditionalist piece on show. But that certainly can’t be said of “Infame Golpazo”; a South American counterpart to Gerry Anderson’s “Stingray” theme, where “anything can happen in the next half hour!!”. In this surprise twist, Troy Tempest and Surface agent X-2-Zero forget their past differences and let their hair down in the nearest available swingin’ puppet bar.

While travelling backwards at a steady rate, this trio clearly show that retro-futurism is surely the way forward, erm, as it were.

In the case of Bogotá, this time the influences include the local contemporary Colombian scene where it was recorded, and there are spirited contributions from The Meridian Brothers (Damián Ponce, Cesar Quevedo, and the bonkers musician Eblis Alvarez) and the singers Juanita and Valentina Anez Rothmann who also record as Las Anez. This label in fact released a compilation of Meridian Brothers mayhem in 2013 called Devoción (Works 2005-2011) which I would recommend. Plus our favourite Cologne axeman Joseph Suchy adds his craft to three tracks. This collaborative element has really opened up a range of possibilities for Klangwart, and while there’s no explicit aim to produce some sort of modern Euro-Latin fusion of styles, the end result is just grand. The spicy mix of instrumental flavours is all good, and everyone performs brilliantly, but I will single out Damián Ponce for his percussive and drumming work – he’s injecting a lot of energy, life and passion into the whole project, much needed when you’re dealing with so many electronic elements. From 10 January 2019.

Cuban-American Pablo is an expert in Latin and funk music, and is also a writer and historian besides being a musician. Latin and funk aren’t quite in my line (although I do frequently indulge my taste for Funkadelic), but I can groove on the sheer weirdness and vitality of Chastity Revolution. The vocals of Teddy Fire hit me first…abrasive and mean on opening track ‘Howlin’ Ham’, I soon learned to love his endearing semi-innocent manner of vocalising, and even the press notes invite comparisons with Jad Fair. He raps in a fetching non-professional manner, by which I mean he’s not trying to sound like a million other 1990s hip-hop rap artistes, nor engaged in a competition to pack as many words as possible per square inch into the vinyl. There’s something about his delivery I can’t shake off; he walks a knife-edge between insouciant cool and impassioned pleading as he struts his way through these surreal raps.

Speaking of which…as a feat of writing alone, the verbiage on this release ought to be nominated for some sort of special prize for warped street poetry. No wonder a printed lyric sheet has been included. T. Wulff and P. Yglesias have written some memorable mind-curlers, each one a compelling comic-strip vision of bizarre proportions, and people by such madcap characters as Harry Comatose, the Jello Girl, and Frank The Lima Bean Boy. I’m wondering if these raps began life as comics, or drawings. “Why don’t you say the rest?” “Well, I can’t, it’s a drawing, but I’ll try.” That’s from ‘Electrical Smile’, one of my favourites on the album, which comes close to creating a snapshot of a film noir nightmare that even surpasses Tom Waits.

There’s a lot of guitars on this album, along with the beats and distorted production, which may be because of the number of guitarists in the band (assuming they’re not all part of a hoax). I’m no expert but that is some funky, greasy guitar work. The press notes point out the way a track can shift from psychedelic freak music to R’n’B without batting an eye, which is true, but I’d like to add rockabilly to that mix, even if it’s inappropriate to do so. It’s all that reverb, you see. What an oddity…and a delight. The record is a joint release with Peace & Rhythm, Pablo Cuba’s vinyl label. From 17 May 2016.

I’ve got a lot invested in this record personally. By which I mean I care for it very much. I didn’t exactly buy it when it came out, but I do have an original copy which I purchased by mail order in 1981. It had a deep effect on me. Recently, I was lucky enough to meet Alvaro and interview him about his life in London, and the making of this bizarre record; you can read all about it in issue 23 of TSP. With its attention-grabbing title and the year of its release, you’d be forgiven for thinking the record was an attempt at Punk Rock, or perhaps a strange and misguided bid to cash in on the phenomenon. When you play it, there’s no amplified guitars and very few drums, and no screaming vocals by some cheap impersonation of Johnny Rotten. Yet it’s true to the “spirit” of Punk, I would argue, because it’s such a personal and utterly uncompromising vision, realised by a very single-minded and singular fellow; and with its DIY credentials (entire production paid for from Alvaro’s pocket), it foreshadows a lot of what the post-punk and indie bands and labels were trying to do. Rough Trade, for one, should have supported Drinkin My Own Sperm, and there’s no evidence that they did; maybe it was too radical even for them.

Alvaro doesn’t sing or play punk rock on this record, though. It’s all songs, every one of them based around the acoustic piano. He delivers a species of Latin American inflected folk song crossed with upbeat and very jagged rhythms, sometimes straying into very romantic cocktail-hour lounge jazz. He tries his best to “rock out”, on some songs on the first side, with his very limited set-up: acoustic piano, a non-rock drummer, and the help of a “faik bass”, which in fact is a bass Moog. Through clumsy overdubs that don’t quite match up, and his own drive and determination to keep the song tempo going, Alvaro manages to come up with a crazed form of syncopation that in places defies belief. On the first side, the songs tend to pile up at the end in a delicious riot of overdubs: vocals, nose flutes, crashing piano chords, and percussion, all expressing the turmoil and chaos that rages through Alvaro’s brain. And doing it mostly acoustically, I might add.

Then there’s his singing voice, one of the elements that comes across most strongly on today’s spin. It is full of passion, emotion; in trying to express his despair and anger at the world (be it the political situation or just plain boredom) he twists his larynx into near-impossible shapes, growling and hooting as needed to make sure he’s understood. It emerges as somewhat eccentric, for sure, perhaps even a bit humourous; but it’s genuine. This is something I felt back in 1981, and still feel it today; 99% of other vocal recordings somehow drain this away in the production, to give us an “acceptable” listening experience, but Alvaro managed to keep it all alive and intact, raw and bleeding edges and all. There’s a directness of communication here that is rare enough to begin with, and something that’s even harder to capture on record.

Speaking of communication…I noticed on today’s spin how little of the record is actually sung in English. About half the lyrics are sung in his native language, and though there’s a lyric sheet and translation provided, it may strike one as a little unusual for a record made in London with the hopes of selling to an English-speaking audience. But its also true that this language barrier is not a barrier at all, and the truth of Alvaro’s meaning will be self-evident as soon as you listen. The humanity, the emotion hits first; when you have the time, pore over the lyrics and start to untangle the meanings for yourself, a process which is very rewarding on the superb (though uncharacteristic) ‘Palido Sol’, as close as Alvaro got to making art-rock music in the vein of RIO groups such as Henry Cow [1. Cathy Williams sings on this track.].

I will single out the title track. In terms of its musical construction, it’s got a stark simplicity that would be the envy of any UK cassette band or post-punker who was working so hard and earnestly to reverse the trend of a million excessive and over-produced Rick Wakeman LPs; if that was part of the NME-inspired post-punk agenda, Alvaro achieved the work effortlessly, and with no-one even noticing at the time. This track contains such jaw-dropping dynamics – by which I mean yawning gaps and silences inducing electrifying tension – that even This Heat could have learned a lesson or two. It also boasts Alvaro’s most mannered and bizarre vocals, where in places he’s transforming himself into a monstrous yawping entity, groaning from the bottom of a pit, in order to speak of his own frustration and boredom. Which is the key theme to the song, and the entire album; masturbation, here bizarrely extended into a sex act that involves consuming one’s own ejaculate, is a metaphor for the futility of life. The metaphor is echoed in the song by other grim glimpses of life in 1970s UK; one of them involves listlessly drinking tea, another waiting for the social security cheque to arrive. By the end of the song, both Alvaro and Narvaez are repeating “Cannibalism! Cannibalism!” (in English and Spanish) with incredible gusto, trying through some primitive chanting ritual to keep the horrors of life at bay, while realising modern man’s predicament: we are eating ourselves alive, simply because we’re bored. Today, we do it through Twitter, Facebook, and selfies, but it’s no different; it’s all part of the same quagmire of vanity.

The LP is lively and upbeat on the first side, sad and introverted on the second side; this is signalled to us through the “Heads” and “Tails” titles for each side. Life’s like flipping a coin. The poignant sorrow induced by “The Whip Of Indifference” is a mixture of resignation and rage, reflected in the mood changes of this beautiful piano ballad; soon, that same indifference is felt after ‘Valparaiso’, a song of homesickness for his home town, which after a great build-up by an imaginary impresario in an imaginary nightclub, is greeted with sarcastic applause by an imaginary lone member of the audience. “Stupendo, stupendo,” groans this listener in world-weary tones, clearly unconvinced. Ironically, Alvaro’s audience has probably not really grown that much in all this time (apart from the good people at WFMU, who always give him a warm welcome), but his determination to get his message to the world has not diminished one bit.

Now presented by Feeding Tube Records, this reissue includes a splendid booklet of notes by Byron Coley, where he tells his own story of how he first procured and heard this exceptional record; I’m pleased to note my own TSP feature has evidently been helpful in his research too. Plus there’s a photo of Alvaro I’ve never seen before on the cover. The reissue pays close attention to the details of the original artworks, and even their own additions are rendered in the correct typewriter font; and the lyric sheet insert is included too. We look forward to their reissue of his second LP, Mums Milk Not Powder, where the deficiencies of the original pressing will be corrected. Feeding Tube have rescued another superb obscure oddity, one which surpasses even their reissues of Gary Wilson and Orchid Spangiafora. From 27th September 2015.

It’s very important to establish the right frame of mind when reviewing an album, I always think, so before popping this one into the CD player I sprayed on the fake tan, opened my shocking pink ruffled shirt to the navel, and poured myself into my sequinned dancing trousers. You know, like any normal person would when contemplating an album with song titles like “Cumbia” and “Merengue”.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I was greeted by a blast of free jazz/tropical-punk mayhem. Although the rhythms and tunes on this intriguing disc are recognisably Latin, I think it’s safe to say that you’re unlikely to hear the Dave Arch Orchestra tackling them on Strictly Come Dancing any time soon.

Fiesta, Que Viva La is actually a portmanteau album, showcasing the works of two separate ensembles formed by the same pool of musicians from Bogotá’s Javeriana University in the late 1990s. The first five songs (and a burst of introductory chatter), are by the Ensamble Polifónico Vallenato. Imagine a Colombian version of your favourite BYG Actuel free jazz horn-blower playing accordion in a local incarnation of The Pogues, and you’ll get some idea of what this sounds like.

Vallenato is a type of popular mainstream folk music, and an ubiqitous sound at the time these tracks were recorded. As bass player Mario Galeano tells it, “we used to live very far away from the university and we always had to take a one hour ride in the morning and then one hour in the afternoon to get there, and the kind of vallenato that you were hearing on the public buses was a very cheesy type of 90s vallenato…so we decided to do our take on that cliché sound…and to do our own noisy, atonal version.” Mission accomplished, on this evidence.

The tracks by Sexteto la Constelación de Colombia lose the accordion, bringing in a heavy battery of percussion and the ethereal sounds of flutes, whilst keeping the free-blowing skronk levels high. These songs came about as a result of the band’s growing interest in rootsier folk music from the Caribbean coastal regions, so they adopted a new musical persona to play them. They manage the difficult trick of being true to the source and totally out there at the same time.

The musicians have since dispersed into other avant-garde tropical outfits like the Meridian Brothers and Romperayo, so this disc is a valuable document of a formative and fertile moment in Colombian music. Take this along to your local Latin dance club and you’ll either clear the floor, or find some very interesting new partners.

Great to hear the return of Anne Rolfs who knocked the socks off the Sound Projector tootsies in 2008 when she recorded as Allroh…just one woman, a guitar and a singing voice creating much unkempt rock-based avant whoopery through her powerful little amp. If I ever felt myself slipping away from my fundamental rock roots, I felt I could depend on Allroh to remind me of the basics of Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, and The Magic Band. She’s now back as one half of Auf with a record simply called CD (GRAUMANN RECORDS GR-002), 20 minutes worth of hard-driving steel for you to sink into the backs of any passing anacondas or zebras…joined now by drummer Mathias Brendel who also drums in Skew Siskin, the band that once supported Motorhead, but he may be more well known in showbiz for playing in Peaches’ touring ensemble. While this mini-album isn’t as off-the-wall as Allroh’s manic work, we still recommend it for its directed energy, its relentless hammering qualities – it could push a man through the trunk of a tree. Also its monotonous (in a good way) tone, where neither guitar nor vocal stray very far from a single root note, which (as Bo Diddley or Mo Tucker will tell you) is mandatory if you want to create great rock music without actually signing a contract in your own blood with “Mr Pitchfork”. Anne Rolfs drives down the freeway like a manic dwarf behind the wheel of a Greyhound bus. Meanwhile Brendel’s stickwork is filling what’s left of the available space. In fact it’s arguably a little heavy on the paradiddles and clever fills, and just a shade too “busy” for me personally. If I were managing this act I would insist on a drummer who just plays one large tom and a snare in simplistic fashion for that idealised “rockabilly” sound. However, it seems Rolfs spent years looking for the perfect drummer before she settled on this Russell Brand look-a-like, and her decision is not to be questioned. Neither is the decision to dress up like a low-rent version of White Stripes on the cover. At some point after they formed their chops in rehearsal rooms and recorded this, they were enlisted to support Steve Albini’s Shellac on tour. Since this is the same Albini who spotted Anne Rolf’s potential when she was part of Wuhling in the 1990s, this probably proves once again that talent will out. From 17 June 2013.

Last heard from Necro Deathmort with their 2012 album The Colonial Script, with its memorable “dead astronaut” cover printed in sumptuous shades of black. Their EP1 (DISTRACTION RECORDS DIST29) is six tracks from 2013 pressed as a 12″ vinyl 45 with snazzy artwork by Thomas Neulinger. Mostly because of their name, I always think they ought to be a Black Metal band, but they’re dancefloor types really – this Newcastle duo mostly create variants of Techno and dub music with a vaguely sinister vibe, full of growling and snarling drone effects. I like the heavyweight dub track ‘Titan’, but the remainder is ordinary electro-beat malarkey.

Pogus Productions take us back in time to discover the contemporary academic music made in Peru or by Peruvian musicians between 1948 and 1979. Reading the booklet inside reveals the intensity of the relation between the politics in Peru and the composers and musicians wanting to raise “Western” modernity in their country. The odd aspect of this record is that when you listen to the music itself, you’ll have no way to hear a difference between the music produced in Peru or produced during roughly the same period, in Paris for instance. It does have very good phonic music, orchestral works, mixed electronics, instrumentals or tape music beyond any cultural context or written western history of that epoch. It is an important reminder that the history of this music is far-reaching and does not belong only to the West. A compilation is not always the best way to show this, because it does reduce the richness of the composers/musicians works in some ways, however it does offer up a taste of those composers we may want to indulge more in. Works from Edgar Valcárcel, Enrique Pinilla, Walter Casas and Enrique Iturriaga to name a few probably deserve some CD space in themselves.

These composers were trying to be part of the musical revolution of the 1950s and beyond, they were learning the codes and proposing a music of their own. But what is their specificity? What makes them different from other music “schools” of that time (musique concrète, electronic, performance…etc.)? Why should they be different anyway? The question today for listeners in 2014 is also: what’s happening in Peru now? Who are the composers, the musicians? Jaime Oliver is quoted as translator and he is also a musician/composer living in the US. What has happened in Peru since then? Will there be a follow up to this CD?

A. BAUGE

We’ve got a sleeve note written by Roberto Conlazo, one of the original “unholy three” who created the Reynols madness in the 1990s. Anla Courtis was another of that trio, and he’s involved in the story too. Conlazo used to run a music school in Buenos Aires, and Nelson Gastaldi showed up there one day, leaving after a brief exchange about keyboards. Later Gastaldi met both Conlazo and Courtis by chance, and after a long talk about shared musical interests they had no hesitation in claiming this man as one of Reynols’ spiritual ancestors. Later still, they managed to interview him and have the results published in San Francisco’s Bananafish magazine, once the printed haven for far-out musical oddities of all stripe. If you like reading far-flung tales about strange visions and the power of ritual, it is certainly worth seeking out a copy of this text. Luckily it’s available on the label website. It persuades me that Gastaldi can probably be aligned with the magical-realist tradition of South American writers, like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

One of the nuggets to spill from his mouth indicated that Gastaldi had a horror of all that was mainstream and successful in art, particularly music festivals, art galleries, and media coverage. He tended to see the dominant culture as a trap, a factory which just created “more of the same” and “parasite music”. This may account for why his own music has been kept out of the public eye for so long; perhaps he was a deliberately self-exiled Outsider. Like Charles Ives who worked in insurance for most of his life and kept unpublished scores in his desk drawer, Gastaldi worked for an electric company in Buenos Aires for most of his life. Only since his death in 2009 is the information and the music beginning to emanate out into the sphere of attention. Would he be happy about this? I’m always struck by the reaction of Henry Darger, whose secret cache of writings and artworks was discovered in his flat towards the end of his life, a revelation he was powerless to prevent. His reaction on hearing the news was one of unmitigated horror; the worst had happened.

We’d probably want to move back one or two notches from that end of the purist Outsider Art scale when accounting for Gastaldi’s music. After all, Roberto Conzalo was invited to the composer’s house and was extremely pleased to witness the bare-bones setup used by the artist to realise his music. Very basic tape recorders, cheap keyboards, some actual acoustic instruments including violin and trumpet, and lots of toys and percussion devices. It doesn’t take an expert to realise that the genius of this strange music is all in the imaginative power of the creator in this case, the resourcefulness that could make art out of almost anything; I am reminded of Joseph Cornell and his well-ordered boxes of cuttings, objects and commonplace found items that were reorganised into three-dimensional statements of profound beauty. This is one reason I always get so bored and fed up with electroacoustic music made by prize-winning composers in Canada who have expensive studios, keyboards, filters, computers and lavish effects at their disposal, yet what ends up on the grooves of their releases is boring, lifeless, academic tripe, for all its rich surface.

My own predilections in this area lead me to favour work like Gastaldi’s, which vibrates and floats with its own understated raw, uncooked energy. The work has been digitally restored from the composer’s home tapes, which makes me wonder if the wobbly tremor effects are part of the intended work or part of the restoration process. Either way they work beautifully. Lastly we have the title which may or may not be referring to Siddhartha, the 1922 novel by Herman Hesse. I was advised to read this book when I was 16 but I found it dull and unengaging, and since then have always remained unpersuaded by tales of spiritual illumination and self-discovery. I’m more attracted to the second half of the title, El Poder De La Nada which translates as “The Power of Nothing”. While Gastaldi’s music here may have some trace elements which put one in mind of the swirling mandalas of Popol Vuh or Between, there is also a very eccentric trajectory that causes the music to meander as inexorably as a huge river, cutting its way through inhospitable turf. From February 2012 – sorry to have been so dilatory in noting this release, but I find it is still in print. Recommended.

Thanks to guest co-presenter Tim Abbott

1. Os Mutantes, ‘Dom Quixote’ (1969)
   From Mutantes, USA OMPLATTEN FJORD 002 CD (1999)
2. Tom Zé, ‘Nao Buzine que Eu Estou Paquerando’
   From Grande Liquidação, original issue SONY BRAZIL 050010 LP (1968)
3. Caetano Veloso, ‘Annunciaçao’
   From Caetano Veloso, original issue PHILIPS R 765.026 LP (1967)
4. Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa, ‘Quem Me Dera’
   From Domingo, original issue PHILIPS P 785.007 P LP (1967)
5. Gilberto Gil, ‘Ele Falava nisso todo dia’
   From Gilberto Gil, original issue PHILIPS R 765.024 LP (1968)
6. Tom Zé, ‘Curso Intensivo de Boas Maneiras’
   From Grande Liquidação, op cit.
7. Ronnie Von, ‘Maquina Voadora’
   From A Maquina Voadora LP (1970)
8. Traffic Sound, ‘Survival’ (1971)
   From Yellow Sea Years, VAMPISOUL CD (2005)
9. Marconi Notaro, ‘Ah Vida Vida’
   From No Sub Reino dos Metazoários LP (1973)
10. Ruy Maurity and Trio, ‘O Rosário’
    From Em Busca do Ouro, original issue BRAZIL SOM LIVRE SSIG 1016 LP (1972)
11. Liverpool, ‘Marcelo’
    From Marcelo Zona Sul (1969)
12. Laghonia, ‘Glue’
    From Glue, original issue MAG LPN-2403 LP (1963)
13. Som Imaginario, ‘Voce Tem Que Saber’
    From Som Imaginario LP (1971)
14. Los Dug Dug’s, ‘Felicidad’
    From Cambia, Cambia LP (1974)
15. Tumulto, ‘No Soy de Nadie Soy Feliz’
    From Tumulto, original issue CHILE EMI ODEON LP (1973)
16. Persona, ‘Terra’
    From Persona, original issue PRIVATE PRESS LP (1975)
17. Walter Franco, ‘No Fundo de Poço’
    From Ou Não, original issue CONTINENTAL SLP 10.095 LP (1973)
18. Tobruk, ‘Theme from my mind’
    From Ad Lib, original issue BRAZIL CASH BOX CB 501 LP (1972)
19. O Bando, ‘Alegria Alegria’
    From O Bando LP (1969)
20. Flaviola, ‘Romance da Lua Lua’
    From Flaviola e O Bando de Sol, original issue BRAZIL SOLAR LP 100.002 (1974)
21. Bango, ‘Motor Maravisha’
    From Bango LP (1970)
22. Náhuatl, ‘El Hongo’
    From Náhuatl, original issue CISNE / RAFF LP (1974)
23. Perfume Azul do Sol, ‘Equilibrio Total’
    From Nascimento LP (1974)

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