More than 40 years ago, the Ann Arbor band Sproton Layer—consisting of three high school students, brothers Roger, Ben and Larry Miller—recorded a psychedelic album that, for years, was regarded as Ann Arbor’s “great lost psychedelic classic,” says Roger Miller today, only half-jokingly.

When they recorded it, Roger was 18, while twins Ben and Larry were 16. Roger was the bassist, lead singer and primary composer, with Ben on guitar and Larry on drums. Also in the band was trumpet player Harold Kirchen, brother of Bill Kirchen.

The album, “With Magnetic Fields Disrupted,” was recorded in fairly primitive fashion, in their parents’ basement, next to the washing machine, after they hung blankets on the clothesline for sound dampening. While it was a heady progressive-rock excursion, it didn’t get much attention, mostly because the brothers were still kids and didn’t yet know much about promotion, or about how the music industry worked.

When the record failed to land them the higher-profile gigs they hoped for, the band “sort of fell apart,” says Roger Miller, and they began pursuing other musical projects. Roger went to school, on and off, throughout the ‘70s, including a couple of stints at the University of Michigan, before moving to Boston in ’78, and co-founding the seminal punk band Mission of Burma in 1979—a band that re-united a few years ago and is still touring and releasing albums. He’s also been active in a few other bands over the years, like The Alloy Orchestra and M2, and has also been a blogger for Slate and the Huffington Post.

In the ‘70s, Ben and Larry were in the popular local psychedelic / punk / performance-art band Destroy All Monsters, and then in the ‘80s, they hooked up again in the band Non-Fiction. Ben moved to Chicago, and later to New York, and is presently the composer and conductor for the Sensorium Saxphone Orchestra and plays guitar for the Glen Branca Ensemble and Transistor, among others.

Larry remained in Ann Arbor, and in the late ‘90s, took on the monikier Mister Laurence, and plays children’s music and makes children’s music videos and surreal short films—and, in his spare time, plays in Blueshouse/313 with guitarist Mike Brooks.

In the early ‘90s “Magnetic Fields” was finally issued on CD, but it still didn’t go anywhere, because the record label that released it was in financial trouble and eventually folded. Then, in 2011, Wolfgang Reuther, who heads up World of Sound, a German psychedelic / prog-rock label, heard “Magnetic Fields” on a website, was excited by what he heard, and tracked down the Millers—and offered to remaster and re-issue the album.

He did, and his stellar remastering job—and his enthusiastic marketing of the album—resulted in the long-lost psych classic finally finding an audience—and getting enthusiastic reviews. The re-issue also included a 20-page booklet recounting the history of the band, and their original psychedelic drawings from back in the day.

“We were stunned that anyone would even still be interested in the record, and even more stunned that it would get such great reviews,” says Roger Miller with a laugh. “At the time, it was suggested that it would be fun to do some Sproton Layer reunion shows, and play the album, but, with us living in three different cities, and all having many other musical projects going, we just couldn’t get the logistics to work.”

The three brothers remain good friends, and remain in touch, and earlier this year, “Ben called me and said, ‘Look, if we’re ever going to do this, we should do it this year,’ so I checked my calendar, and found I had two weekends in June free, when I wasn’t playing with Mission of Burma, or The Alloy Orchestra,’” relays Roger.

And so it came to be that on the weekend of June 14-15, Sproton Layer will at long last reunite and perform “Magnetic Fields,” almost in its entirety, plus some other Sproton Layer songs that have been sitting in the can for 40-some years. Those other songs will be included on another collection of Sproton Layer music, to be titled “Press Your Hand and the Whole Room Fluctuates,” and is slated for 2014 release.

On Friday, the band will launch into interstellar overdrive (yes, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd was one of their big influences) at the Blind Pig, and then the next night, will scale the psychedelic cosmos at P.J.’s Lager House in Detroit. While Harold Kirchen is still friends with the Millers, he no longer plays the trumpet, says Roger Miller, so the trumpet parts for the shows will be handled by Steve Smith.

To prepare for the shows, the brothers have been playing along to the album in their respective homes, before heading to Ann Arbor for four days of rehearsals prior to the shows. “But when I first began playing along to the album, I immediately remembered those songs, because that music and that era meant so much to me,” says Miller by phone from his home in suburban Boston. “It was the first time we’d created original music, and when you’re a teenager, you think that’s the greatest thing that ever happened.”

Miller is jazzed about the shows, and even expects the rehearsals to be “a weird mixture of silly grins and a lot of emotion, since that music did mean so much to us. We recorded it at the end of the psychedelic era, late in 1970. The next couple of years, rock started becoming less experimental and more conservative, and that’s when a lot of the more simple heavy metal was starting.”

Besides Barrett-era Floyd—especially the debut album, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”—Sproton’s main influences were “the first Soft Machine album, with Robert Wyatt,” and the obscure psych-electronic group Silver Apples, says Miller. “But we were also into the SRC and the MC5. We were musically trained - we’d played in the school orchestras and could read music. So, in the afternoon, we’d go see the MC5, and then at night go to a performance at the University of Michigan where they’d be playing Stockhausen and John Cage.

“So I guess we were blending the MC5 with Stockhausen,” he quips.

After the Ann Arbor / Detroit shows, Roger and Ben will leave town to do their other gigs, and then the brothers will hook up do another few Sproton shows in Boston, New York and Northhampton in July.

When Miller listens back to Sproton Layer’s 1970 music today, he is struck that “it was actually pretty impressive that we were able to create that kind music, given how young we were. Our improvisations were pretty atonal. Anyone could lead us into an improv, and 15 seconds later, we’d be in a totally different place.”

But when they do these reunion shows, they won’t use the songs as launching pads into extended improvisations that reflect present-day musical sensibilities that may depart from the Sproton Layer ethos, says Miller: “No, for these shows, we’re very much interested in re-creating the 1970 Sproton Layer experience.”

Kevin Ransom is a freelance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.