The Flower Kings
It seemed that supergroup The Sea Within would be this year’s primary focus for guitarist Roine Stolt, but suddenly he’s reappeared in his Flower King guise…
Keyboard player Tomas Bodin isn’t on the new album… is there trouble afoot? Prog finds out…
Some albums are long in the making and well signposted, while others are not. Announced only in September and released in November, Roine Stolt’s new Flower King album, Manifesto Of An Alchemist, falls clearly into the latter category. Manifesto… follows hot on the heels of Stolt’s new supergroup The Sea Within’s eponymous debut album, which was only released in June, just before that band’s live debut at the famed Night Of The Prog festival at Loreley in Germany.
It transpires that the genesis for a new Flower King album – we’ll revert to the nuance of ‘King’ in the singular – was in fact the preparations for The Sea Within’s NOTP show. Given NOTP’s stipulation that The Sea Within’s debut live appearance should constitute a European exclusive, drummer Marco Minnemann was faced with a long journey from his California home for a single show.
“I was thinking about how we could motivate Marco to come to play the Loreley show,” Stolt explains. A convenient solution was to involve the drummer in a recording session for what has become Manifesto Of An Alchemist. “It was very spontaneous. I hadn’t really figured out which songs to record,” Stolt professes.
Indeed, Stolt explains that without the tour that they are currently on (alongside Spock’s Beard to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the InsideOut label, preceded by a handful of dates this month in Mexico and South America earlier in November), he would probably only have started work on the album next year.
However, when InsideOut boss Thomas Waber suggested a joint Flower Kings/Spock’s Beard tour, Stolt had to tell him that there wasn’t currently a Flower Kings in existence. Waber pointed out that Stolt has written the vast majority of The Flower Kings’ dozen albums, plus his solo 1994 album The Flower King, and that there was plenty of music to play.
And so Minnemann’s visit to Europe meant that drums were recorded in Holland this summer, before Stolt returned home to Sweden to continue work on the album, which InsideOut proceeded to fast track for a pre-Christmas release.
“That forced me to record and mix the album within a month, which is something I haven’t done in the last 25 years. I found it interesting. Now with everyone having a computer-based recording and mixing studio at home you can go on forever, spending months polishing your recording to perfection. There’s a certain level of perfection that you want, but I was thinking I could do things in a different way this time.”
With five years having elapsed since the last Flower Kings album, Desolation Rose, Stolt solicited various other musicians to join him for Manifesto…, albeit juggling the logistics of trying to assemble an album during the summer holiday season.
“It’s not the ideal time to record an album, but in a strange way I enjoyed being forced to record very quickly and having people