Vaughan Oliver, the British artist and graphic designer who helped create the visual identity of the 4AD record label and so many of the legendary imprint’s best-known bands, including the Pixies, Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, The Breeders, This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance and more, died Sunday.
4AD next month will celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pale Saints’ early shoegaze classic The Comforts of Madness with a multi-format reissue that will include 2CD and 2LP editions featuring previously unreleased demos and the band’s one and only John Peel session. Details and full tracklist right here.
4AD Records will commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Pixies’ debut full-length Surfer Rosa next month with a dual reissue of that album and its 1987 predecessor, the eight-song mini-album Come On Pilgrim, that will include a bonus live set from 1986. Full details and tracklist right here.
4AD this March continues its Cocteau Twins reissue series with new repressings of the dream-pop masters’ second and third albums — 1983’s Head Over Heels and 1984’s Treasure — on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl and in “digital HD audio” versions for the download enthusiasts out there.
For this week’s installment of “120 Minutes” Rewind, we check in with late-’80s/early-’90s dreampop act Pale Saints, who appeared on the show in 1990 to discuss their debut on 4AD, The Comfort of Madness. The group, led by Ian Masters, also discuss covering a song by Opal.
In conjunction with the release this month of the 25th anniversary reissue of the Pixies’ classic second album Doolittle, the 4AD label has produced a 30-minute promotional film in which guitarist Joey Santiago and drummer David Lowering reflect back on the making of the record.
The Pixies will mark the 25th anniversary of their classic sophomore album Doolittle with an expanded 3CD, 50-track reissue this December that will feature, as bonus material, the record’s B-sides, two of the band’s Peel sessions in their entireties, and a full disc’s worth of demos.
The Pixies will debut their new Kim Deal-less lineup with four Los Angeles concerts prior to their appearance at Riot Fest Chicago this September, to be followed by four more small club shows in New York City before the band embarks on a previously announced European tour.
Legendary independent record label 4AD — home in the ’80s and ’90s to the Pixies, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Throwing Muses and so many more — will be the subject an exhaustive history this fall with the publication of Martin Aston’s new book “Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD.”
The 20th anniversary reissue of the The Breeders’ ‘Last Splash’ will come in a mammoth 7-disc vinyl box set that features the original record, a live album recorded in Stockholm, a collection of previously unreleased demos, non-album tracks and BBC session cuts, and four individual EPs repressed on 10-inch platters.
In the wake of the 2011 Sony warehouse fire in London, a group of U.K. record labels has launched Beat Delete, a Kickstarter-like website designed “for the rescue of potentially lost releases” by allowing labels to gauge fan demand for reissues before actually re-pressing niche vinyl titles.
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