Manifesto Of An Alchemist Roine Stolt's The Flower King

• 1 Rainsong 01:27
• 2 Lost America 09:50
• 3 Ze Pawns 08:27
• 4 High Road 12:32
• 5 Rio Grande 07:50
• 6 Next to a Hurricane 04:25
• 7 The Alchemist 06:57
• 8 Baby Angels 03:48
• 9 Six Thirty Wake-Up 04:17
• 10 The Spell of Money 09:48
• Total Runtime 01:09:21

Info for Manifesto Of An Alchemist

Roine Stolt, known as the guitarist, singer, writer and at times band leader of the groups The Flower Kings, Transatlantic, Agents of Mercy, Kaipa DC, as well as from his work with prog icon Jon Anderson and the new super-group The Sea Within, is releasing a new album on the 23rd November 2018. Under the moniker ROINE STOLT’S THE FLOWER KING, ’Manifesto Of An Alchemist’ offers 10 songs and almost 70 minutes of playing time celebrating the style Roine is most revered for: progressive rock, richly orchestrated with all the trademark elements from four decades of the genre.

Roine comments: "Unlike many later albums, where recordings have continued over months, this new album has been a fairly quick and effective affair – we started tracking in Holland at the beginning of July and mix was done by mid-August! The songs are written in a very 'unorthodox' way - some melodic content and some riffs are ideas that have been circulating for years - some may even be from before the first TFK album - they just hadn’t found a home in any of the bands/albums I did in the last 15 years yet."

'Manifesto Of An Alchemist' is a celebration of all the styles that have been part of the colourful, daring and dynamic songwriting and arrangements that Roine masters like no other, yet also offers a more immediate, more hands on approach. "Like that first TFK album, I’m the main lead vocalist here again – it works as these lyrics are important to me and resonate with my view of the world. A lot of the guitar work is actually my spontaneous 'demo' guitars and that goes for much of the synth work, too. I didn't want to 'process' ideas too much as there is much power in the initial creation – I wanted to keep it that way."

The album features a host of other musicians, including long-time collaborators Jones Reingold, Hans Froberg & Michael Stolt, as well as fellow The Sea Within member Marco Minnemann, Max Lorentz, Zach Kamins, Rob Townsend & Nad Sylvan.

Roine Stolt, lead vocals, guitars, keyboards
Jones (former known as Jonas) Reingold, bass
Hans "Hasse" Fröberg, guitars, vocals
Michael Stolt, bass, vocals
Additional musicians:
Marco Minnemann, drums, vocals
Max Lorentz, Hammond Organ
Zach Kamins, keyboards
Rob Townsend, saxophone, flute, percussion, vocals
Nad Sylvan, lead vocals, backing vocals

Roine Stolt
A major figure in Sweden's rock history, guitarist/singer/composer Roine Stolt led two of his country's most successful progressive rock bands: Kaipa in the 1970s and the Flower Kings from the '90s onward. His distinctive guitar style combined David Gilmour's debonair midtempo, Steve Howe's sharp edges, and Frank Zappa's virtuosity. His vision of a positive world governed by beauty (akin to Yes singer Jon Anderson) gave his music an aura that appealed to many progressive rock fans.

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, on September 5, 1956, Roine Stolt started playing bass in the late '60s in local rock cover bands. He quickly discovered the burgeoning British progressive rock scene and had switched to electric guitar by the summer of 1974 when, at age 17, he became the lead guitarist of the professional prog rock band Kaipa. This band recorded three albums for the Decca label (reissued on CD by Musea) and is still considered to be the most important Scandinavian prog act of the '70s.

Stolt left Kaipa in 1979 to form his own group, Fantasia, who recorded two albums and disbanded in 1983 after a second, more commercially oriented LP for Warner. Stolt then started to work as a session musician and record producer, drifting away from symphonic rock esthetics, something very obvious on his Hall & Oates-like 1985 solo album Behind the Walls (his first performance as a lead singer), and The Lonely Heartbeat, released in 1989 under the name Stolt.

Witnessing the progressive rock revival of the '90s, a movement that partly originated from Sweden with bands like Landberk and Anglagard, Roine Stolt was quick to come back to his ancient love. Recruiting ex-Jonas Hellborg drummer Jaime Salazar and ex-Samla Mammas Manna percussionist Hans Bruniusson, he released The Flower King in August 1994. Stimulated by the warm response, he enlisted brother Michael Stolt (bass, vocals) and longtime friend Tomas Bodin (keyboards) and formed the Flower Kings, which would remain his principal musical project for years to come. At the helm of the Flower Kings, Stolt experienced international fame as the band became, with the U.S.'s Spock's Beard, the best-selling '90s prog rock act. Albums were released at an incredible rate: six studio albums (including two two-CD sets) in the band's first six years of existence. Meanwhile, Stolt found time to record two solo albums, Flower King and Hydrophonia (the latter an instrumental symphonic prog CD) and was part of the prog rock supergroup project Transatlantic, who released an album, SMPT:e, and toured in 2000. Both bands took up most of his time for the next decade-and-a-half though he managed to issue one more solo album, Wall Street Voodoo, in 2005.

In 2014 at the instigation of InsideOut Music label boss Thomas Waber, Stolt met former Yes vocalist Jon Anderson. They were asked to consider recording a series of suite-like tunes that would echo what Yes accomplished on Tales from Topographic Oceans and Anderson's own Olias of Sunhillow, albeit with a modern prog bent. After trading ideas back and forth on the internet for months, live sessions were initiated in March of 2015 with a full band and backing vocalists selected by Stolt. The album Invention of Knowledge, billed to Anderson/Stolt, consisted of four long tracks. It was released to global acclaim by Inside Out in June of 2016.

Late in the year, Stolt approached Waber with the idea that he'd like to assemble "a new band moving in a fresh direction with new collaborations." To that end, he enlisted Flower Kings' bassist Jonas Reingold, keyboardist Tom Brislin (Yes, Renaissance, Camel), drummer Marco Minnemann (Aristocrats), and vocalist/guitarist Daniel Gildenlöw (Pain of Salvation). Calling themselves the Sea Within, they issued a self-titled offering for Inside Out in early 2018. Later that year, the guitarist's Facebook page announced the imminent release of Manifesto of an Alchemist by Roine Stolt's the Flower King. Though considered a solo release, Stolt enlisted a large cast of guest collaborators including his Sea Within bandmates Reingold and Minnemann, as well as old friends Hans Froberg, Michael Stolt, Max Lorentz, Zach Kamins, Rob Townsend, and Nad Sylvan. The album was issued by Inside Out in November of 2018.

This album contains no booklet.