Bolivia is a country who rarely pop up on my radar. Thankfully, today we have a hard-rock/psychedelic gem to present to you. Wara were influenced by hard-rock giants like Uriah Heep and Deep Purple, but they also added touches of their own Bolivian heritage to their music. Straddling the borders of psych, hard rock and prog, this album is considered to be one of the holy grails of South American rock music.
Guerssen Records out of Catalonia, Spain is known for putting out some amazingly weird psych and lo-fi music, but this one has to be one of the most charmingly weird ones in their catalog.
Two Paraguayan brothers of German origin, Joern and Dirk Wenger, self-released an album in 1971 called Pops de Vanguardia and had a deal with EMI-Argentina for a series of albums which came out and gained them a bit of fame, but Joern was also a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, so you know his weirdo bona fides were going to be solid. This album does not disappoint at all, as one can hear Stockhausen’s powerful influence as well as touches of the music of The Beatles (naturally, as they were as huge in South America as they were everywhere else) and The Beach Boys (listen to some of the vocal harmonies and you will notice what I mean.
I’ve said this before in the past, not perhaps on this blog, but on the previous one: we live in an amazing time where so many of these lost artifacts see the light of day and show us what might have been with just a little more development and a push from more forward-thinking record labels.
Thanks to Guerssen for their continued support of freak rock.