With his virtuoso guitar skills and fantastical, creative ambition, Roine Stolt has been a pillar of Europe's progressive rock scene since the 1970s, and has embarked on numerous musical adventures with bands Kaipa, The Flower Kings and Transatlantic, and as an eclectic, sonic-melding solo artist. Growing up in Uppsala, Sweden, Stolt took up the guitar at the age of 12 after hearing The Beatles and The Doors on his mother's radio, and started playing bass in blues-rock school bands before turning professional when he joined Kaipa in 1974. He stayed with them for three albums of cosmic, stoner, psych-jams, before his own band started out named Fantasia, but evolved from kaleidoscopic noodling into more soulful songwriting and became Stolt's solo project as he fully mastered his guitar skills and began singing lead on 1985 album 'Behind the Walls'. His follow-up 'The Lonely Heartbeat' also found a balance between symphonic rock grooves and sophisticated pop hooks in 1989, but he returned to his hippy, funky, acid-fried roots on album 'The Flower King' in 1994, and turned the project into the band The Flower Kings, who joined a prog-rock revival in Europe by indulging in poly-rhythmic grooves and epic, meandering, Pink Floyd-like set pieces.
His other solo work darted from grandiose, space jazz on 'Hydrophonia' in 1998 to ambient, medieval-rock fantasies on the collaboration record 'Bollenberg Experience - If Only These Stones Could Speak' in 2002 and swampy, nocturnal, blues riffs on 'Wall Street Voodoo' in 2005. But Stolt spent most of the 2000s releasing around 20 albums in ten years with The Flower Kings and new prog supergroup Transatlantic. He also recorded with Agents of Mercy, Circus Brimstone, Tangent and a reformed Kaipa, before recruiting a host of friends to appear on his 'The Sea Within' project. He returned with the typically ambitious, boundary-pushing, solo record 'Manifesto of an Alchemist' in 2018.
