The Alien Tide

American rock ‘n’ roll icon The Ventures return with the first all-new studio album in 24 years! With the fresh New Space LP they seek to echo and pay homage to 1964’s (The) Ventures In Space, one of their biggest-selling and most popular albums of all time. Although with a different line-up than sixty years ago, Bob Spalding (lead guitar), Ian Spalding (rhythm guitar), Luke Griffin (bass) and Leon Taylor (drums) succeed well in similarly merging instrumental surf pop and space rock into twelve fascinating cinematic pieces. Melodic originals and fitting covers – Fly Me to the Moon (written by Bart Howard, popularized by Frank Sinatra) and Vibrations and Eleventh Hour (by the founders of The Ventures) – make this a welcome return.

Esoteric Recordings are pleased to release the classic lost album by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Strangelands. Recorded in the Autumn of 1969, the sessions were an attempt to resurrect the Crazy World by Arthur Brown and featured some classic material. Divided into four sub-headings, (The Country, The City, The Cosmos and The Afterlife), Strangelands was certainly ahead of its time but failed to gain a full release for nearly two decades. In hindsight, the material can be seen as the blueprint for Arthur s next project, the innovative Kingdom Come.
This Esoteric Recordings reissue also adds the legendary Replicas sessions by Rustic Hinge. Featuring Crazy World drummer Drachan Theaker and guitarist Andy Rickell, the project was originally intended to feature Arthur Brown as vocalist and also featured the legendary High Tide guesting on one track…

Petrushka (1911), along with The Firebird and The Rite of Spring , is one of the three innovative ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev that were composed by Igor Stravinsky during his ‘Russian’ period. Nicknamed a man of a thousand faces by his contemporaries, Stravinsky revealed his neo-folklorist face in Petrushka ; in collaboration with the artist and librettist Alexandre Benois, he courageously brought a motley street crowd, complete with a magician and his puppets, merchants, gypsies, cabbies, and mummers, onto the ballet stage.