Classic RockProgressive Rock
The Lleida label Guerssen announced five vinyl reissues on 14 October, spread across three of its imprints, on staggered dates. Three are already out and two are still on pre-order: “Waleeco” arrives on 6 November and the label has given no date for “Once Upon A Twilight”. The rarest is the self-titled album by Instant, a group formed in Toulon in 1976, out through Sommor.
It was recorded in 1978 and pressed by Pathé Marconi in 1981, but it never came out: the project’s patron disappeared before the artwork could be printed. The musicians left Paris and abandoned boxes of records in an attic, and when the house was later emptied virtually the whole pressing was destroyed. Around a dozen copies survived. It holds four pieces of zeuhl, jazz-fusion and choral experimentation written by Jean Cortes and Bernard Kalef, and the edition comes with a download card carrying a newly recorded 2022 version of the album.
The second story is “Waleeco”, by Flat Earth Society. In 1968 a Boston advertising firm commissioned a group of teenagers from Lynn, Massachusetts, to record an album and a jingle for a local candy company, and the LP was handed out as a mail-order premium on the custom label of Fleetwood Recording Studio in Revere. In 1974 Fleetwood reportedly discarded scores of unopened boxes of it. The master tapes survived: the 1968 mastering had folded the two channels into mono, and the reissue restores the separation. Aaron Milenski called it in the Acid Archives “one of the better Bosstown artifacts”.
The other three are “Once Upon A Twilight”, the second and final album by Australia’s The Twilights, recorded in Melbourne in early 1968 and held back until October when Ford pulled the funding for the television series of the same name, now remastered by archivist Alec Palao; the self-titled Stone Garden album, with recordings made between 1969 and 1971 and the 45 version of “Oceans Inside Me” as a bonus; and “Just Like You”, the record the trio Pugsley Munion pressed themselves in 1970 and which Out-Sider had already reissued on vinyl in 2013. The last two come out through Out-Sider.
Guerssen has worked out of Lleida since 1996 and runs eight imprints, most of them devoted to psychedelia, prog, folk and garage, and not only from the 1960s and 1970s.
Text by Enric Vilaplana