So just when we were all high on the news that Best Buy is planning to start selling vinyl at all the their stores, this happened. Matador Records director of production Jesper Eklow revealed to Comcast News (via Guardian) that when 33 1/3, one of the label’s pressing plants, went bankrupt, they lost “pretty much everything up to May 2006.” What was “everything,” you ask? Vinyl lacquers, sleeve films and the freaking original vinyl masters.
Pre-2006 Matador masters lost in the bankruptcy include Cat Power’s The Covers Record, Mogwai’s Happy Songs for Happy People, and many many more. Ugh. Now the label’s plans to reissue and remaster some Pavement, New Pornographers and others have been indefinitely delayed.
To be clear, the original master recordings are not gone and the whereabouts of the lost materials isn’t even known at this point. The only option that remains would be to “basically remaster the albums from scratch,” Eklow says, but this could prove to be too expensive to come to fruition. In other words, FML.