timoVERSION - Puerto Rican Ghost (CD)

Release Date: 04/09/21

avant-tropical postrock..electric guitars, afro-caribbean rhythms, dub texture, loops/samples, spoken word, protest rock

Electric guitars, afro-caribbean rhythms with a dub texture, loops, samples and scratching combine with spoken word at the intersection of North American imperialism, Puerto Rican colonialism, dub reggae and protest rock. AKA avant-tropical post rock.

Deconstructed (dub) versions of home studio demos from the last ten years, Puerto Rican Ghost is a bi-cultural product of our times. Timoversion is the nom-du-rock of Timothy Sasscer-Burgos, a public school language and culture educator in Baltimore, Maryland.

Half-Puerto-Rican and raised in Puerto Rico, Sasscer-Burgos grew up with the vibrancy of salsa and jíbaro (folk) musics, the intellectual and artistic influence of various Latin American progressive ideologies, and the joys of surfing, diving and socializing at some of the most wondrous beaches in the Caribbean.

His parents were educators (a nuclear engineer and a college president), and had taken a keen interest in the emerging civil rights protests in the early 1960's, before moving to Puerto Rico, and Sasscer-Burgos was exposed early to Bob Dylan & Pete Seeger recordings. As he got older, he became more aware of the racial and cultural caste differences imposed on the American colony, but also to the rock and soul music heard on nearby American military bases. Bob Marley emerged onto the international scene when Sasscer-Burgos was in his mid-teens, and by the time he arrived at college a few years later, punk was happening.

He understood that creating an authentic music for himself would have to take into account his life experiences, and that even if the political situation in the Caribbean remained at odds with American policies, the tension could be used to artistically look for solutions, using the most interesting aspects of each culture to suggest a coalition, a path, a progress.

These home recordings are reminiscences, revisits & reconstructions of some of the musical and cultural ideas that have been important to him since his island days.