Someone forgot to tell the Jimi Hendrix Experience that second albums are notoriously difficult to make. Recording just months after the legendary trio’s flash-bang debut, Are You Experienced, Hendrix and his cohorts- Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding- return serve with Axis: Bold As Love, strongly refuting the theory of the sophomore slump. If nothing else, this magnificent album showed, instead, just how prolific, confidently experimental, and emboldened Hendrix was at that critical moment.

Nearly six decades after its release, the late musician’s estate revisits Axis with this 4-CD, 1-blu-ray set gathering the harvest of those 1967 recording dates. Jimi Hendrix, the workaholic, indeed. Beyond the two discs offering the stereo and mono versions of the proper album, the remaining two spinners are stuffed with alternate takes, live cuts, and works-in-progress. Included, illustratively, in the bounty are several iterations- and, ultimately, the original mono mix- of the future single, “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” that foreshadow 1968’s Electric Ladyland; on-deck in Hendrix’s lineup of perhaps the most remarkable run of a first three albums for any artist ever.

And because Hendrix released only three studio albums in his tragically short lifetime, Axis, serendipitously and in hindsight, became what its title implied- a point of reference between the debut and the finale. At once, leaning back on Experienced and ahead to Ladyland, truly it was the middle connective piece, overflowing with trademark evolutionary, revolutionary Jimi. “Little Wing,” “If 6 Was 9,” and “Castles Made Of Sand,” as just a few of the majestically mystical tracks.

Presented by trusted Hendrix engineer and producer Eddie Kramer, and remastered by the incomparable Bernie Grundman, either version- stereo or mono- is definitive and illuminating in its own right. The stereo take is pure psychedelic funk-and-roll, at times cyclonic in the speakers; the musical equivalent of the box’s cover art- a rainbow-colored dragon rearing up- provided presciently and precociously by an age-five Jimi. Not to mention, the opening, shifting, sonically altered dialogue concerning UFOs that slides into the streetwise soul of “Up From The Skies,” and the trip is underway. The mono take is less a swirl and, alternatively, more a straight shot; its ballistic thrust concentrated and directed for a discernibly different result. Both more than worth the experience.

Add-in the plentiful bonus cache, a booklet detailing the sessions, and the blu-ray containing the Dolby Atmos mix and the aforementioned versions- and featuring the original, Indian-inspired cover art- and this collection is a most comprehensive overview of an essential album. Hear it, now, in full technicolor wonder; Hendrix and his Experience as a storm building strength. In the eye of the hurricane, an axis, bold as love.