SATURNIA – Stranded In The Green (2021, LP/CD Sulatron Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Sulatron Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Transparent Green Vinyl, 180 gram with full-size inlay, 500 copies

Format: CD, Album, Gatefold Digisleeve (CD has two more tracks than LP, due to limited vinyl playing time), 500 copies

Release Date: 26 March 2021

Luis Simões, a Portuguese multi-instrumentalist, founded in 1996, Saturnia, a free art communal project for various artistic professions. Focusing on Psychedelic/space rock he released under the Saturnia moniker, 7 albums (since 2001), making Saturnia a European Cult band for the last 20 years. Saturnia’s 8^th album is going to be released by Sulatron Records and the press release reads:

“Sulatron Records is proud to release the 8th album of the Portuguese kultband Saturnia! Founded in the mid-nineties by multiinstrumentalist Luis Simões, he recorded the albums mostly by himself, but also with a few selected guests, notably Daevid Allen (Gong), Nik Turner (Hawkwind), and Stefan Koglek (Colour Haze). The first 7 albums were released on Elektrohasch Records…

Recorded in the countryside, part of it outdoors in vine country, Stranded in the Green puts mythology, wine, sunlight, feral wildness, and nature to music, building upon the already established ingredients of Luís Simões’s classic psychedelic rock brew but also adding new elements in a truly organic and refreshing album…
Saturnia rarely play live, but toured Germany, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, France, and England with Colour Haze for a month in 2012.
Luis Simões on this album: Vocals, guitars, sitar, tampura, bass, bass pedals, gong, organs, synthesizer, Rhodes piano, Mellotron, chimes, and drums.
Plus Ana Vitorino: Spoken word on Pan Arrives

and Winga: Djembe on Keep it Long.
Recorded between 2018 and summer 2020 at Lagoa do Calvo. Mixed by Luis Simões. Mastered by Ricardo Bravo. Cover art by Luis Simões”.

The CD version of “Stranded In The Green” has two more tracks than the LP, due to limited vinyl playing time. The album opens with the weird intro “Pan Arrives” with lots of sheep-bells sounds and various effects under a mysterious kind of scenery… The musical trip of the album starts with “Keep It Long”, a groovy, trippy, and tribal-sound flirting, Sitar drenched that slowly transformed into a Spacey-Rock tune, comes to mind a 70s version of bands like Kula Shaker or Cornershop, maybe… “Fibonacci Numbers” is a slow and rather atmospheric number, spacey effected and Psych-ally flavored, early Porcupine Tree comes to mind. “Smoking in the Sun” dives into a dark deep foggy but heavy slow and torturous spacey landscape while “Super Natural” is a more earthly tune, more ‘grounded’, the birds are singing, nature is calling, a nice melody with soft warm vocals unfolds but after a while the song is literally launched into a colorful splendid Prog-Sphere, the whole scenery acts as a safe back home trip among some ‘Canterbury’ meteorites, let-loose Gong atmos that is transformed into a hallucinogenic “Riders On The Storm” environment towards its end, surely one of the best moments inside this album! “When I’m High” is a beautiful piano-based prog ballad, poppy, and very Porcupine Tree-ish… “Perfectly Lonely” (CD Bonus) is a weird tune with effected backward vocals showing a kind of an experimental attitude. “Butterfly Collector” is a very cool distorted psychedelically proggy tune, dark but adventurous and mind-blowing, and “Just Let Yourself Go” (CD Bonus) is a slow and quite trippy tune that flirts with Progressive Rock with a nice guitar melody and numerous spacey (and not) effects! “Stranded In The Green” is a very cool album, Saturnia’s aficionados would not be disappointed, Space-Prog fans would also not be disappointed… Well, actually, I think that it’s very difficult to find a simple human out there not to be able to please his senses by listening to the amazing sounds of Saturnia’s “Stranded In The Green”! TimeLord Michalis  

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