Kim Gordon by Natalia Mantini
Sonic Youth have dipped back into their the archives and released Hold That Tiger on their Bandcamp page.
As Steve Shelley reminds us, the album was originally recorded back in 1987 and first saw light in 1991 as a ‘semi-official bootleg’. “The recording was nearly 60-minutes in length, so to prevent manufacturing a cost-prohibitive double LP, the master was slightly sped-up to fit the entire concert (us blasting through a finely-tuned set of songs from Sister, EVOL and a nightly encore tribute to the Ramones), on one single LP,” he writes.
“Cramming the grooves of the vinyl in such a way resulted in Hold That Tiger playing at a lower volume on the stereo, thus the ‘one hour long – don’t have a cow! – crank it up’ sticker affixed to the front of the original LP cover. A few years later in 1998, Hold That Tiger was remastered for CD re-issue. The audio quality was improved from the lower fidelity LP but unfortunately the slightly sped-up performance was not corrected – until today!”
“We are pleased to make available the best-sounding version of Hold That Tiger via the Sonic Youth Archive on Bandcamp.”