Los Speakers: A Columbian Psych

Psych spanned the globe during the ‘60s. Some of the groups from outside of the States and Britain were a bit late in coming to the stoned soul party, but everyone eventually caught on. There’s been much made about the Brazilian scene of the time, but other countries down there in America del Sur had just as much going on.

Columbia – while still probably best known for coffee and narcotics – was host to a few groups during the decade that would take up the mantle of psych purveyors. The stifling political and economic climate didn’t make for an all too hospitable place, but a few acts were able to reel off successful discs.

By 1968, in the States, psych had grown to encompass a huge swath of sub genre’s. But in locales that weren’t necessarily privy to the newest and latest thing, the Beatles and the Stones were still slowly dripping in. One group from Columbia, the Speakers (or los Speakers, either way), were already well into its career by this time. And by releasing an experimental - for the time – album entitled En El Maravilloso Mundo de Ingeson, the group cracked open the Columbian rock scene.

The disc was purportedly, the first Columbian album to use multi-channel recording allowing the ensemble to utilize a host of supplemental percussion and production work.

The Speakers, 5^th album, perhaps due to the fact that there was a buncha ideas getting worked out for the first time down there, isn’t necessarily the most cohesive or even effort to come outta the ‘60s psych thing.

“Niños” sounds a bit older than it actually is. Listeners can chalk that up to the fact that Columbia probably didn’t get too many copies of the 13^th Floor Elevators shipped down there. The Speakers on this track, though, come off as something like a mid-decade, forward thinking beat combo. And a few years back, that’s what the group was: working out Beatles covers and the like.

Elsewhere, as on “Hay un Extraño Esperando en la Puerta” and “Historia De Un Loto Que Florec,” the band simply became too enamored of the new found production oddities as each track is drowned in altered tape speed rendering both efforts kinda bothersome.

Even with that misstep, there’re places where the Speakers wind up being something akin to the United States of America, a US band that worked out its psych sans guitar, but with an amped up and distorted violin. That instrumentation isn’t at work on “Oda a la Gente Mediocre,” but the second half of the track, when the percussion takes over, the song becomes a harbinger of German psychedelic music that would arise over the coming few years.

Considering uneven might be the most strongly worded criticism to be levied on this disc, anyone with even the slightest interest in Spanish language psych needs to investigate a bit further. There’ve been a spate of re-issues. And while the earlier efforts from the Speakers might be more difficult to hunt down, En El Maravilloso Mundo de Ingeson isn’t.