Matador reissues delayed by lost album masters

By Sean Michaels

One of the largest US indie labels has postponed reissuing albums by Mogwai, Yo La Tengo and Cat Power after losing the master tapes when a pressing plant went bust

Vinyl masters of albums by Mogwai and Yo La Tengo were among those lost when an American pressing plant went bankrupt in 2006, Matador Records has admitted. Records, vinyl lacquers, sleeve films and the masters themselves were binned when 33 1/3 went out of business, making it much harder to reissue albums like Mogwai's Happy Songs for Happy People, Yo La Tengo's Painful and Cat Power's The Covers Record on vinyl.

"Nothing was recovered from 33 1/3," Matador's director of production, Jesper Eklow, told Comcast News this week. "We lost everything. The doors were locked due to the Chapter 11 bankruptcy."

"Everything" makes a substantial loss. Matador is one of the largest American indie labels, representing everyone from Belle and Sebastian to Interpol. The label lost "pretty much everything up to May 2006," Eklow confirmed, delaying planned reissues by Pavement, the New Pornographers and many more.

While worldwide CD sales tumble, vinyl has seen a resurgence, particularly among fans who buy reissues. Records may make up less than 1% of album sales worldwide, but US vinyl sales were up 89% in 2008, making them that rare and valuable thing: a slice of the music industry that is still seeing growth.

Labels like Matador have therefore rushed to reissue popular albums on high-quality vinyl, so the 33 1/3 bankruptcy is a major setback. "Some titles prove difficult to reissue unless we go back and basically remaster the albums from scratch," Eklow said. "It's a slow, expensive and quite an annoying process."

While Pavement, Belle and Sebastian and Interpol reissues are promised "soon", others – particularly early records by Yo La Tengo and Mogwai – are much further off.

"There shouldn't really be any titles that we couldn't ever bring back," Eglo said, "but the question of course would be if it's worth spending a lot of money on remastering and reprinting components we already should have on hand on certain titles. The money lost on the 33 1/3 adventure is quite substantial."

SOURCE: http://www.guardian.co.uk