Undeveloped Orangestar

EXPOSURE is an unprecedented opportunity to be part of an album creation in action. Witness the process as Esperanza Spalding documents the exploration of the most fundamental elements of inspiration, spontaneity, and improvisation live for 77 hours on Facebook.

Prudence was one the most important bands on the Norwegian prog scene in the '70's, which included the likes of Aunt Mary, Junipher Greene, Titanic, Popol Vuh (Ace), Ruphus, Folque and HØST. They fused rock with old party/dance music from Trøndelag and (on their last album) sang in their local dialect, and thereby created a rock style dubbed Trønderrock.

In their early days (1988-1990), Ricky Ross and his Deacon Blue bandmates (who all hail from Scotland) were one of the most prolific U.K. bands scaling the top of the European music charts. Early copies of their 1988 debut album Raintown contained Riches and More, a bonus CD featuring an album's worth of B-sides and other tracks that didn't make it on to the mother album. Although their 1989 follow-up, When the World Knows Your Name, did not feature a bonus disc, this 1990 two-disc release more than makes up for it. Containing almost two dozen non-album B-sides, soundtrack recordings and unreleased tracks (and no songs from Riches and More), this may be too much Deacon Blue for the average person, but is an absolute treasure trove for those smitten with the band since the debut album.

The third and, for the time being, final Deviants album is also, according to frontman Mick Farren, the record that they should never have made. Writing in his 2001 autobiography, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, Farren observes that even the album's title encapsulated the group's state of mind – "so creatively tapped out we couldn't even come up with a snappy name for the damned record." He is being harsh…

Badlands' long lost, third and final album, Dusk isn't really an album at all, but a batch of demos recorded between 1991 and 1992 for the group's then label, Atlantic, which first rejected them, then dropped the band, already mired in personal strife since the troubled sessions for their commercially disappointing second album, Voodoo Highway…

Most of the material from both of the late-'60s albums by this Danish group was combined into one release on this 1997 CD reissue. It shows a band extremely influenced by heavy psychedelic blues-rock in general, and by Jimi Hendrix and Cream in particular, though without the songwriting excellence that those two acts often brought to their recordings. Blomsterpistolen in particular has some of the surface trappings of late-'60s records featuring Hendrix and Clapton in the squealing distorted guitars, phasing, and overall transmutation of the blues to a hard rock format. The opening "Overture - Take Warning" alone sounds like it's determined to stretch the white noise effects that Hendrix used to open songs with a flourish to full-track length…