[Purchase]
In 1976, Argentine legend Luis Alberto Spinetta's prog rock band Invisible released El Jardin de los Presentes, an album I can't stop playing even though I know I still have a year's worth of records to hear. I'd come across Spinetta a few years ago when his former band Pescado Rabioso released Artaud, rated the greatest album to even come out of Argentinia by that country's Rolling Stone magazine. Spinetta has a voice not unlike Jeff Buckley's, full of beauty and emotion. His lyrics are those of a poet.
In the melancholy "Los Libros de la Buena Memoria" ( "Books of Good Memory"), Spinetta sings
The wine warms dreams as it wheezes
From its mouth of greened sweetness
And among the books of good memory
Stays hearing like a blind facing the sea
There is more than a trace of the tango in the music, heightened by the appearance of a bandoneon, a much more subtle cousin of the accordian. The guitar solo is played by a newcomer to the band, 18 -year old Tom�s Gubitsch.
No great work of art happens in a vacuum.
El Jardin de los Presentes was recorded the same year General Jorge Rafael Videla led a right-wing coup d'�tat that overthrew Isabel Per�n as President of Argentina. For seven years a military dictatorship ruled the country, hunting down and killing guerrillas, labor unionists, artists, intellectuals and university students. Their mothers silently protested in front of the government house, walking in circles and wearing white kerchiefs.
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