[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Moshe

https://www.spin.com/2020/02/lee-ran...outh-projects/

SPIN: Lee, I wanted to ask you about Sonic Youth’s Live In Moscow (April 1989) album that came out this month. How do things work with archival projects now that the band’s no longer active, are you involved in picking things out for release or is there someone tending to all of that?

LR: We have a couple of engineers and archivist people that we work with. But we’re still all interested in it, we’ve been maintaining a massive archive that continues to grow. Steve Shelley has been really active in it, and the rest of us a little bit less so, but I’ve been pretty active in helping put together the last bunch of packages that come out. In this case, this guy from Russia just said: “Hey, I’ve got this tape of the show” that we had never heard before, and he wanted to put it out. We kind of batted the idea back and forth of whether we wanted to go that route, and in the end, we gave him our blessings to do it. We’re working on an archival project around Sister right now, which is a massive thing we’ve been working on for a while. And two or three other things as well, something around NYC Ghosts & Flowers, and something around a particular concert we did at the Pompidou Center in Paris with Brigitte Fontaine and Areski [Belkacem] that we’ve been trying to cut the legal tape on and release for like a decade.

SPIN: So would these primarily be live recordings or would those projects involve studio outtakes as well?

LR: A bit of both. The Sister package has an 80-minute CD worth of demos and rehearsals and things like that, and the stuff with Brigitte involves a record full of studio tracks plus a live performance. This stuff is stuff that we wanna see come out, but it’s not slated or approved yet. Live tracks for sure, we’ve got tons of live tapes. Often times we would make records before we went out and tested material live, and material would transform in radical ways live. For instance, NYC Ghosts & Flowers, we’re working on a track-by-track live rendition of that record that has a totally different vibe than the way those songs turned out on the record.

Holy Molly Parker Posey...