Flower Travellin' Band

Formed in 1967, this Japanese proggy-doom heavy rockin' band started their career with 60's West coast acid rock covers under the name Yuya Uchida & The Flowers ("Challenge", 1969). With "Anywhere" (1970 they were in search of their own sound and musical identity, surfing on 70's California rock and on the stoned heavy rock of the Sabbath. Satori (1971) remains their ultimate masterpiece, delivering a really captivating, personal psych-hard rockin' trip with discreet Eastern mystical influences. After this mesmerising stoner rock essay the band released a last album "Make up" (1973). Flower Travellin' Band is definitely a 70's cult psychedelic/space rock standard and a strong reference on the Japaneses underground scene with other psych-proto-metallers as Brush!? and Les Rallizes Denudes.

Best known for its iconic, quite frankly hilarious cover art - featuring the four bandmembers riding three motorcycles, Easy Rider-style, only buck naked - the Flower Travellin' Band's 1970 debut album, Anywhere, unfortunately isn't as original where the actual music is concerned. That's because, with the exception of its minute-long, book-ending solo harmonica workouts, Anywhere was a covers album. And the second of its kind, technically speaking, following 1969's Challenge, which was recorded by the then simply named the Flowers with two different singers tackling Western rock and pop hits of the day by Janis Joplin, Cream, Hendrix, and the Jefferson Airplane…

Flower Travelling Band was Japan's answer to Led Zeppelin meeting Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath at the Ash Ra Temple. Simply put, they played grand, spacey, tripped-out hard rock with a riffy base that was only two steps removed from the blues, but their manner of interpreting those steps came from an acid trip. Flower Travelling Band was an entity unto itself. There are five tracks on this set, originally released in 1971 as the band's second album proper. It has been reissued on CD by WEA International in Japan, with the cover depicting a silhouette drawing of the Buddha in meditative equipoise filled in with sketches of an inner universe mandala of the sacred Mount Meru, stupas, and the hash smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, Japanese sci-fi robot cartoons, and more…

Welsh band Sendelica has been a highly productive entity ever since they appeared on the scene a decade ago or thereabouts. They appear to have risen in stature and popularity in recent years, and a direct consequence of that is that the band have also hit one of their most productive phases in terms of album releases. "The Cromlich Chronicles" was released as a digital and CD production through the band's own label FRG Records in the late spring of 2016, with various vinyl versions released at the same time by UK label Fruits de Mer Records…

Even by the flash-in-the-pan standards of Japan's turbulent late-‘60s/early-70s post-Group Sounds psychedelic rock scene, Blues Creation seemed to come out of nowhere and head right back there again faster than most anyone else. Like many of its contemporaries, Blues Creation was launched by a budding Japanese guitar hero whose mind had been effectively blown by the deafeningly heavy sounds of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath – this being Kazuo Takeda, who had actually already spent some time playing in Europe and America, and was therefore a first-hand witness to the sonic events that spawned heavy metal's birth…