Meat Light: GET 3CD DIGIPAK | DOWNLOAD
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Meat Light sheds light on Zappa’s 1969 avant-garde opus Uncle Meat – an album created with The Mothers Of Invention to serve as the soundtrack to a film that was not finished until the ‘80s. One of the last releases that Zappa’s late wife Gail Zappa worked on with Vaultmiester Joe Travers, the three-disc Project/Object Audio Documentary collects the original 1969 vinyl mix of the album with the original sequence Zappa conceived before he turned it into the masterwork, along with unique source material and bonus vault tracks mostly compiled from the recording sessions at Apostolic Studios in NYC between 1967-68. 

 

Long hailed for its innovation and experimentation, Zappa experimented with tape speed, overdubbing and a collage of sounds. As he wrote in the original liner notes: “The music on this album was recorded over a period of 5 months from October 1967 to February 1968. Things that sound like a full orchestra were carefully assembled, track by track through a procedure known as overdubbing. The weird middle section of DOG BREATH (after the line, “Ready to attack”) has forty tracks built into it. Things that sound like trumpets are actually clarinets played through a Maestro with a setting labeled Oboe D’Amore and sped up a minor third with a V.S.O. (variable speed oscillator).” “Uncle Meat documents the original Mothers at the telepathic height of their musical powers,” exclaimed Dangerous Minds. “The album’s aural collage of short, sharp shocks of avant garde musical interludes, doo-wop, free jazz, spoken word bits, cartoony music and far-out concert recordings were the fullest expression at that point of the young composer’s genius.” [More Info] 

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Recorded September 29, 1978 at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago, the aptly-titled two-disc album, Chicago ’78, captures the second of two shows played that night in its entirety, in great sound quality. The concert delivers with a good blend of fan favorites, blistering guitar solos, audience participation, on-the-spot improvisations and stellar playing from Zappa and his talented band.  Notably, the album includes rare live versions of “Yo Mama” and “Strictly Genteel” and a spontaneous improv by Zappa where he plays riffs that would end up turning into the future songs “I’m A Beautiful Guy” and “Crew Slut.”

In order to present this show in its entirety, it was culled from the three different sources: Main Source: ½-inch 4-Track analog tape masters; Secondary sources: ¼-inch 2-Track reel to-reel analog tape masters and a board cassette. All tapes were heat-treated and transferred at 96K 24B WAV by Joe Travers. [More Info] 

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Long sought after by fans, Little Dots is the sequel to Imaginary Diseases. It consists of additional music compiled from master tapes hand-picked and worked on by Zappa himself of the “Petit Wazoo,” a short-lived 10-piece ensemble with an emphasis on brass and woodwind instrumentation that toured North America in late October-December 1972. All masters were transferred at The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen in 2004. Most of these performances were scattered amongst various reels, some incomplete, all found in The Vault. Zappa would work with material from this line-up on and off, but nothing was ever officially released during his lifetime. Recorded live with the horn-driven ensemble, this collection includes the first legitimate release of the entire three-part “Rollo” suite for the first time as well as the title track composition. “Cosmik Debris” is the first version which predates the issued master on Apostrophe(’) in 1974. The album ends with a mammoth 25-minute long improvisation recorded in Columbia, S.C. [More Info]