There's no cover for this one yet (well, that I'm privy to anyway), but look for the release on October 10th (internationally on November 20th).
Baba Scholae is a legendary psychedelic/early progressive rock band from England that included one Jean-Yves Labat on keyboards. Labat is better known as M Frog, the synthesist and keyboard maestro on Todd Rungren's early Utopia albums. As well, he had a solo album under the name M Frog. And as it turns out, Baba Scholae was even given consideration to be released on Bearsville Records back in the day. Labat also went on to release two electronic albums in the late 1970s that coincidentally SF provided for me, and I had heard only a couple of weeks ago. There's been a lot of synchronicity regarding this release, I'll tell you that.
There's
a fascinating history of Labat weaved into the review of the M Frog album on the verbose and highly informative Book of Seth (Head Heritage), that I would encourage everyone to visit. Especially note the visit to Uganda and Idi Amin!
I had been fed a digital copy of the Baba Scholae album about 6 months ago, but just didn't get around to listening to it until this week. One reason is I couldn't find any info (initially) on the album itself, which makes me suspicious (fake albums are more common than you would think).
And the reason I didn't find anything out is this album was never released!
So I did a bit of inquiry, and one of the kind souls on the Psychedelica Yahoo chat board provided me contact info for Jean-Yves Labat, and a couple of subsequent back and forth e-mails confirms the date as October 10th for release. The international distribution is set for November 20th. At this point it's CD only, but I've asked about an LP reissue as well. We'll see...
Ad Vitam is Labat's own label and is distributed by Harmonia Mundi. Due to that, this is a CD that is likely to be widely available - but a different distribution channel than most of us are accustomed to.
Consider me a first day buyer!
UMR review here
