El Palmas Music HHV Records 2 Items

Angel Rada, pioneer of experimental electronic music in Venezuela, has always been a restless mind, an experimentalist with his feet firmly planted on the ground of the art, his particular mix of sound design, cultural avant-garde attitude and spiritual inquiry led him to explore an impressively rich sound universe throughout his more than 20 productions (one of the most extensive in his country) making him the cult musician he is today. El Palmas Music, an independent record label in Barcelona, pays tribute to this visionary Venezuelan musician in its upcoming release entitled Rada: Tropical Cosmic Sounds from Space, a double LP compilation with 15 carefully selected tracks from Angel Rada’s extraordinary first period, coveted by experimental and cult electronics collectors around the globe. The main focus of the compilation is between 1980 to 1989, the time when Rada released cosmic-tropical experimental jewels such as Upadesa, Viveka, Continuvm, Armagedon & the Third Wave Revolution and Ethnosonic Impressions. Tropical Cosmic Sounds will also be also available in digital platforms and it comes with a code to download 7 additional songs, certainly a delight for music lovers.
Rada embraced psychedelia in his youth, his rock band named The Gas Light gave him the opportunity to experiment with electronic instruments, electric organs and the autoharp. This impulse led him to get his career to the next level. While he was taking music studies in Germany, gets in direct contact with cosmic music and iconic artists such as Klaus Schulze. Back in Venezuela, at the beginning of the eighties, he establishes the foundation of his work and begin to be known as a reference, subverting the industry rules, not only from the point of view of sound and production but also because of his self-management.
Although his direct influences: psychedelia, krautrock and experimental electronic, were a starting point for his work during his studies in Germany between 1973 and 1978, Rada not only mastered the art of analog synthesizers, creating totally new sounds, but put his efforts on the search for an original sound landscape, rooted in its native homeland as in spiritual matters. His music was tagged in his time by his German colleagues as “Latin Cosmic Psikraut”, a futuristic vision of the Caribbean Sea ahead of its time, full of innovative textures and amorphous envelopes with an almost narcotic effect. The general idea of Rada’s sound was to take his influences and evolve from that, from the minimal and repetitive to dynamic and melodic structures, always avoiding the “popular music’s complacency”.
Unexpectedly, while rehearsing, one day in 1999, a natural tragedy would take his studio away, and all those valuable instruments that had accompanied him throughout his life were forever gone. However, Rada was already on another spiritual level, in his own words: “only ceasing to intervene in external events will take the suffering away”. Rada is always adapting his life to the circumstances, he continues producing with his own label, overcoming ever more complex obstacles as the debacle of his country in the hands of the wildest corruption in its history or his own health issues. Still, nothing stops him, his work remains.

Jesús Gómez y su Grupo has been a vinyl jewel impossible to find for decades, a musical treasure ahead of its time with a prodigious voice. Jesús Gómez had not even reached the age of majority when he embarked on the adventure of recording and producing his own album, bringing together songs from the main Afro-Latin rhythms of the moment to which he contributed all his fantastic explosion of creativity. Not long ago, he had earned the epithet of "The Child Prodigy of the Song" which led him to explore and gain experiences in the paths of music since his youth, a passion, but also a craft, that his mother had instilled in him since his childhood and that he shared with other members of his family. Different rhythms, styles, and learnings hardened Jesús so that at only 17 years old he could deliver such a fantastic work, a clairvoyant sound of pure “Salsa” even before it became fashionable to call this type of music that way.

Mythical visits by artists and orchestras from the Caribbean were a catalyst for the appearance of national Venezuelan representatives with a higher professional level who had been working on Afro-Caribbean and Venezuelan rhythms since the 1930s, leaving an indelible mark such as Sonora Caracas, among others. Almost 40 years later, in 1967, as a result of this tradition, a modern and fierce work like this album would be possible, a direct, energetic, rhythmic declaration full of flavors of Guaguancó, Bolero, Descarga, Rumba, and even Guaracha. This base is the hyper fertile ground for the even more fantastic voice of Jesús, with high tones and extreme clarity, perfectly tuned and colorful, a characteristic that will accompany him throughout his life, a blessing, one could say.

Typical of the restless spirit that can be glimpsed on this album, he intertwines rhythms within rhythms, as happens in the singular and mythical “Loca ilusión” that goes from Bolero to Salsa Brava, a turn that leaves a reasonably psychedelic feeling. Let's not forget that we are in a period prior to what would be the canonical Salsa, even since then, this young Venezuelan, at the sound level, was already fluttering over the molasses of the trombones. A gem like “False Love” could get any dance floor on fire right now, a hot guaguancó that should be part of the vault of any Latin music DJ along with the greatest classics like “Tirándote Flores”.

Jesús Gómez is not one to fall short, neither in style nor in rhythm, a true artist from the beginning he also includes Surf and Bossanova pieces, taking his work to other territories without fear. Jesús Gómez y su Grupo was perhaps the definitive step that opened all the doors of a brilliant career for this young man, he would go on to collaborate almost from that moment with countless nationally and internationally renowned orchestras and artists, including Sonora Caracas itself, already historic and still standing at the moment.

If this album reaches your hands, you will have a treasure in it, since it is among the most sought-after in the history of Caribbean music, it has taken El Palmas Music more than 1 year of work to be able to reissue this jewel so that it can finally be accessible to the world while possible, a key piece in the history of salsa in Venezuela and a jewel for the world available maybe for a limited time.