PPR’s got a new CD ready to go: the The (Faded) Red Album. And in typical suicidal fashion they are openly having a launching party in Havana tomorrow night.

Of course, expect some uninvited guests to put a damper on it.

Actually, you should pray if you’re a Christian (if you can find it in your heart to pray for a band whose logo is copulating genitalia forming a hammer and sickle).

If you can’t read el espani, here’s the link above translated to some vague semblance of the ingli via Babel Fish:

Impersonal Corrective exhibition Guests Special: Nationalistic Jurassic advice of the Plastas Arts In memoriam

Sponsors: And it remembers: “Young fana and acuéstate to singar”

Ciro can’t drive away from Castro’s bull****

Cuban dissident Jorge Luis García Pérez (aka Antunez). Ciro and Claudio were arrested while publicly expressing their solidarity for Antunez, who is ailing from a prolonged hunger strike.

Two samples of Ciro — thrashing mad in PPR’s “El Submarino” (yeah, the one I covered as Frank’s Enemy):

….and waxing mischievous in his reinterpretation of Jacek Kaczmarski’s “Mi Escuelita” (about a typical day of indoctrination for a normal schoolkid in Marxist country):

The news just came in less than an hour ago. I’ll post more as I find out more.

UPDATE: Here’s the email from Charlie composed at 3:45 p.m. today:

Ciro Javier Díaz Penedo, frontman of La Babosa Azul and lead guitar player of Porno Para Ricardo was just arrested in Placetas along Cuban photographer Claudio Fuentes Madan, when they offered their solidarity to the the president of the “Presidio Politico Cubano “Pedro Luis Boitel”, the very well known dissident Jorge Luis García Pérez, known as Antunez.

Antúnez is very weak and in ill health as a result of a hunger strike and a continued fasting, which he is maintaining as a protest against the unparalleled abuses of the fascio-communist regime of Havana. We will keep you updated as soon as we get fresh informations.

The reports just arrived from Havana, in this precise moment, please divulge and disseminate as soon as possible to stop the dictatorship and to help liberating Ciro and Claudio, inconditionally.

We place the responsibility for the physical integrity of Ciro and Claudio on Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and their numerous snitches

Life is such a whirlwind sometimes. Anyway, a lot has been happening with Cuba’s dissident punks Porno Para Ricardo, and I’m late on the ball. Blame a combination of my own laziness and the IRS.

There’s a new website for PPR, for one. But, as soon as it got out of the gate something happened with the Cuba Underground folks which led to a parting of ways that seems amicable enough. As a result, they’re picking up the pieces and starting again with a new webmaster at some point in the future. The site looks great, but the content is rather thin, consisting of sporadic updates by my friend Charlie Bravo and some interesting exchanges in the comments sections under the posts.

On February 1, Gorki, Renay and Hebert were arrested, held for awhile and released with a fine. Someone filmed the beginning of the arrest. The guy in the red beret is doing the arresting.

The regime is stepping up its campaign against PPR. No surprise, since they, along with blogger Yoani Sanchez, are telling the world just how unclothed the emperor really is. But now, Castro Inc. are employing other Cuban rock bands to this end as snitches.

If you know your Spanish, reading the above mentioned comments sections will be a revelation. One of the snitches makes his presence known, as well as a couple of other individuals whose posts have that Stalinist whiff of the true believing sheep, citing Miami Cubans (like me, I guess) as the bad guys in all this.

There’s also a new CD awaiting release called The (Faded) Red Album. You can preview the tunes here. I can’t wait to hear the whole thing.

Yoani interviews Gorki about his arrest here.

Gorki has managed to get a Facebook page, with a little help from his friends.

And it looks like Charlie got that Strat and has recorded a tune of his own. Look for the vid for his tune, “El Rompeolas” in the player on the site.

Finally, on a personal note, this is what started everything: after only being available via streaming in various social sites, I have made my 2007 EP Gorki’s Tune featuring three mixes of my cover of PPR’s ballad “23″ available for free download at area1234.

Submarine – Old school hardcore cover of the Porno Para Ricardo track, incorporating recording of state-sponsored bullying of PPR singer Gorki’s supporters during his incarceration last August. Download here. Lyrics here.

But back to the new tracks. I finally got the house to myself a couple of times last week to engage in chaotic noisy activities such as “playing the drums” and “recording a typical Frank’s Enemy vocal.”

The end result is four songs in the pipeline, to be released under three different names.

Here’s what I’ve got:

1. There’s No Stopping A Determined Asshole (Frank’s Enemy): 45 seconds of grindcore fun. With three different vocal tracks (good ice cream flavor names, I think): 1. hardcore screamo emo 2. high pitched black metal/grindcore shriek 3.cookie monster grindcore grunts. Plus one of my atonal lead guitar flurries. And a four second synth part, too. And I’m still 48 years old.
2. Submarine (Frank’s Enemy): Cover of a killer Ciro Diaz-composed track from Porno Para Ricardo’s masterpiece A Mi No Me Gusta La Politica… I’ll tell you right off the bat that their version kicks my version’s ass, but if it leads people into checking out the Pornos’ work because it is in ingli, it’s enough. My interpretation tries to edge the music into old-school hardcore with screamed vocals. The middle part incorporates Yoani Sanchez’ recording of a demonstration in support of PPR singer Gorki while he was in jail last August. I still need to overdub a lead guitar.
3. LBPunk4Xmas (Loogie Soup): Frank’s Enemy played two gigs and put out one tape in 1996 under this name, playing sloppy pop punk. I wrote this song a few years ago and pronounced it the perfect Loogie Soup Christmas song, if there ever was a reunion. No reunion ever happened but I did get a drum kit, so I recorded the drum part a couple of days ago. Very very garage-ey since I hardly know how to play the freaking kit, and I had to set the tempo on the slow side so I could keep up. I ended up with sawdust all over myself from hitting the cymbals too hard. I’m going to edit the crap out of it in the computer to try to minimize the unintentional humor. Still needs bass drums, git, voice, and some kind of sleighbell percussion.
4. I Am A Libertarian (Julio Rey): I feel a bit bad because I wasn’t too present in my blog while all the election crap was swirling around a couple of weeks back. This was mostly because, as I have stated before, I have nothing of significance that I can blog about that I cannot state better through my music. So I’d rather communicate through music as opposed to piling on more idiotic prose on top of what’s already floating out there in cyberspace (such as this very sentence). This song is my response to the election, and I still haven’t finished the lyrics. I wrote a first draft in 1993 in the wake of Bill Clinton’s election. This will be an update. So far all I have down are two acoustic guitars.

“Buenas noches….nos han informado que ustedes estan regalando
cerveza en este local. Nos pueden dar dos?”

Subject matter has been pretty relevant to PPR lately.

They were invited to play at an art gallery in Havana last night and Castro, Inc. forced its postponement (by way of releasing a laughable statement discrediting the event by attempting to tie it to Bush…what’s not funny is that the people behind the statement can put you in jail at their slightest whim).

Monitor the happenings in Spanish at Black Sheep and a new Cuban blog, Octavo Cerco.

It got me into the old mood. Check this out:

GGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!

You can follow the action at my Twitter. Musically the original tune is kind of thrashy, I’m trying to edge it closer to an old-school hardcore beat with a nu-metal/grind guitar sound. The words are about leaving Castroland (the country formerly known as Cuba) in a homemade submarine. More about that here (including the original Spanish lyrics to the tune).