Esoteric Recordings are proud to announce the release of a new deluxe 3CD which tells the story of the so- called “underground” era of one of Britain’s great independent record labels of the 1960s & 1970s, Transatlantic Records. In the heady atmosphere of the late 1960s, the sea change in British popular music spearheaded by the Beatles experimentation on the Sergeant Pepper album and swiftly followed by the likes of Cream, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Family, Procol Harum, Jethro Tull and a host of groups and musicians who followed in their footsteps led to the album being seen as the medium in which “serious” musicians would explore and develop their craft. The apparently disparate genres of blues, jazz, rock, folk and even world music were fused together by many diverse acts all of whom were eager to be regarded as “progressive” in their musical approach. The so-called “underground” audience eagerly consumed this music, which sat alongside the social changes that were also taking place.
Mysterious. Powerful. Magical. On March 26th, 2021 the new cracker album "Monster Mind Consuming" by the mystical folk-rock sensation Manntra will finally be released. It is already the band's second English-language album. Even the first single "Ori Ori" is a real thunderstorm of sound. Croatian folk influences merge with metal and industrial to create a perfectly staged, highly independent musical symbiosis. The songs all have what it takes to reach a new dimension in the dark circus.
40th anniversary deluxe reissue. The massive 5CD+3DVD ‘Monster Edition’ includes a new Steven Wilson stereo mix of the album, plus a host of associated recordings, also newly mixed by Wilson (CDs 1 & 2). The third disc offers demos, master mixes, rough mixes and more, while CDs 4 & 5 deliver a live set from Germany performed in 1982. The three DVDs included with this Monster Edition offer audio only content, with the first devoted to 5.1 and hi-res stereo mixes of the album associated recordings. The second DVD delivers even more associated recordings in the same audio formats, while DVD 3 is the Live in Germany 1982 concert in hi-res stereo and 4.1 surround sound.
Wedding the experimental free-folk of "New Weird America" to the more conventionally song-focused SF freak-folk movement, Six Organs of Admittance mastermind Ben Chasny comes into his own on this, his first-ever studio-recorded LP. Richly textured and three-dimensional, School of the Flower straddles the line between moody ambient madness and vintage sunlit psych-folk.