Send "Various Artists " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 One of my fantasies is to be able to wander through the complete archives of the world's great record labels, neatly ordered and annotated. The history of recorded sound only stretches back to 1878 (1857 if you count the phonautograph), but in that time, output has been prodigious, on the order of millions of recordings, many of which are lost. How cool would it be to walk into an Indiana Jones-like warehouse with the entire unabridged catalog of Columbia Records, a company that's made recordings since 1888? Of course, no such place exists-- the many large companies that made records worldwide through the middle of the 20th century had no central warehouses where everything was gathered, and the smaller labels often suffered from lack of organization and resources. If your offices burned in a war, well, that was it for your archives.Cuba's EGREM (Empresa de Grabaciones y Ediciones Musicales-- literally "Music Recording and Publishing Company") is one of the many labels whose history I'd love to tour. It is the product of revolution, founded in 1964 after Castro and his government had consolidated their power, and it's been the sole entity responsible for documenting Cuban sounds on record ever since. While the generic name reflects the ideology of its communist overlords, the label has played host to a mind-boggling array of soulful, vital, innovative, and inventive music. On the first Si, Para Usted volume, Waxing Deep exposed a clutch of funky, sometimes psychedelic recordings from the 1970s and 80s that showed that the changes that swept through the world's pop music in the decade previous didn't leave Cuba behind in spite of the suffocating political environment. Here, they've gone even deeper, jettisoning many of the known names of the first volume in favor of mostly unfamiliar artists....full text |
| Popmatters |
| I’ll start by saying that I haven’t listened to Si, Para Usted: Volume 1, so I don’t know whether Volume 2 is better, or worse, or merely different. According to the booklet: “This volume continues where the first left off, but we shift our curatorial focus just a little.” The compiler, Dan Zacks, explains that the Cuban government of the 1970s helped professional musicians thrive by subsidising their training and making them employees of the state, but it also subjected them to the inanities of bureaucracy and censorship. A musician who wanted to leave one band and join another had to apply for permission, which might take years to arrive. Clothes and hair were scrutinized for foreign influences. Music that seemed to glorify capitalist societies was not encouraged. “Ask [Cuban] musicians active in the 1970s about the day’s funkiest band, and almost all will mention Los Dada. By all accounts, Los Dada played a heavier version of the funk Cubans heard on Miami radio, and the band was infamous for its raucous shows. Yet, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Los Dada recorded not a single track. Los Dada […] were simply too “American”... In acknowledgement of this, Volume 2 features a number of tracks from groups affected by government whimsy. For example: the musicians of Los Rápidos were not state-sponsored and were therefore able to record a song only after they had been selected to appear at a 1974 culture festival in Havana. That song appears on Volume 2. “Safari Salvaje” is a mix of smooth organ, jittery guitar, and mondo exotica percussion, vamping and rolling with energy. To be an amateur in 1970s Cuba didn’t mean that you lacked talent. The professionals put on a good show, too: Hilario Durán’s freestyling piano in “El Son de Victoria” goes beyond entertainment into art, and the backing singers of “Para Qué Niegas” pop their voices around like parrots trained to hiccough on cue....full text |
| Emusic |
| Post-revolutionary Cuba isn't the first place to look for the influence of American funk and psychedelic experimentation, but Dan Zacks of the Waxing Deep radio show makes the case -- with the music he selects here and his informed liner notes -- that Cuba produced its fair share of free-form music in the '70s and '80s. Zacks sets...full text |
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