Gloria Martin - En Concierto -1972- (LP, Philips), Venezuela

Finally I am able to present another album by my favorite Venezuelan singer Gloria Martín. For all information about her and her absolute masterpiece album I direct you to this post over at Archaic Inventions. This Live album by Gloria Martín from 1972 is evidently more revolutionary than her self-titled album, allthough some of those songs are present here as well. It conforms much more to the Nueva Canción music she is known for. Martín knows like no other how to combine simple everyday life themes with more revolutionary discourse throughout her songs. She does it all with great intelligence and elegance through which the early seventies in Caracas is being heard. It's a pure insight into the intellectual and student-revolt mentality of Venezuela during that era and pure beauty of the mind of a poetical, rebellious and intellectual left-wing girl. I won't go too much further into the music, because I want the songs to speak for themselves.

Absolutely essential and highly recommended!

HERE

Vimazoluleka, Levy Rossell -1966- (LP, Escenario Juvenil), Venezuela

So when I first picked this up in Venezuela I thought, here it is, the most lysergic acid drenched psychedelic rock from Venezuela you will ever hear. It turned out slightly different, but not for the worse. Vimazoluleka was a theatre play written by Venezuelan director Levy Rossell. They were performing it in 1966 in Caracas in a tunnel near to the Galería de Arte Nacional and at the time it was finished Rosell was only sixteen (!) years old.

Vimazoluleka will only appeal to you if you can understand Spanish, if not there is not much to find for you here. Still the theatre play is interesting and depicts a so called anthropology of Caracas in the sixties. It looks at the different layers of society and how these different groups get a long with each other. The whole is placed in a totally absurd framework with characters that are absolutely insane. There are recordings of acting and quite a few songs on the record.

This is a very rare example of an highly unconventional hippie-esque Latin American play, again preceding Hair by years, depicting a certain moment of social struggle in Caracas. It's a play that displays a lot of social critique from a time in which psychedelia, freedom-thinking and equality was starting to manifest itself in societies of the world. Funny thing is that the whole critical dimension of the play couldn't be much more relevant now. That's why some years ago they also recreated this play in a somewhat urban format for the contemporary time which to my opinion kind of sucked.

How much of these records survived? No idea.

Más sobre la historía de Vimazoluleka aquí y aquí.

Caracas para locos.