Although Ramases' debut album is best known today for featuring the infant 10cc as accompanying musicians (the 1990 Repertoire reissue even flags their involvement on the front cover), it is, in fact, deserving of considerably more attention than even that merits. Insistent, percolating rhythms float across a lightly funky soundscape, building with an intensity that ebbs and flows with every track and begging comparison with some of the other, darker folk devils that danced around the fringes of the early-'70s British underground. Comus, Gravy Train, and Dr. Strangely Strange all inhabit similar musical caverns, even as they strained toward new peaks of uniqueness, and Ramases shares that ambition - and occasionally even surpasses it…

Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of Glass Top Coffin, the second album by Ramases. The duo (Martin Raphael and his wife Sel) first came to prominence with the release of the album Space Hymns on the Vertigo label in 1971. The Glass Top Coffin project took several years to write, and Ramases vision of an inter-galactic concept finally appeared on Vertigo in 1975 in an elaborate sleeve. The sessions saw contributions from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra and was arguably the most fully realised of the two Ramases albums.