As if tracking down a copy of your favourite album on vinyl wasn’t hard enough already, Matador Records has admitted that the bankruptcy of American pressing plant 33 1/3 has ensured a large portion of their vinyl back catalogue has been binned.
According to The Guardian, vinyl masters of albums by Mogwai, Yo La Tengo and Cat Power were lost when 33 1/3 went out of business in 2006.
"Nothing was recovered from 33 1/3," Matador’s director of production, Jesper Eklow, said. "We lost everything. The doors were locked due to the Chapter 11 bankruptcy".
The losses mean that Matador, one of the largest American indie labels and home to acts including Interpol and Belle and Sebastian, has had to delay planned reissues by bands such as Pavement and the New Pornographers.
Matador had planned on reissuing popular albums on high-quality vinyl, but the closure of 33 1/3 has seen the loss of "pretty much everything up to May 2006".
Eklo added: "Some titles prove difficult to reissue unless we go back and basically remaster the albums from scratch. It’s a slow, expensive and quite an annoying process."
"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."
