Haco Announces Reissue/Remaster of Cult Classic After Dinner Live Album ‘Souvenir Cassette’

Today, legendary art pop artist Haco, in collaboration with labels Fish Prints (US) and ReR Megacorp (UK), has announced a reissue and remaster of After Dinner’s cult classic 1988 live album Souvenir Cassette, a recording birthed as a result of a 1987 summer tour of Europe (Nijmegen, Amsterdam, London, Zurich, and St. Rémy).

We call this a live album, but perhaps this is a misnomer. As Haco describes the process of its creation: “After the tour. I listened to all of the material from our concerts and field-recordings of environmental sounds such as church bells, street organs, birds singing, and barking dogs beyond the outdoor stage at Festival MIMI. I copied those from cassette to reel-to-reel tape, spliced it by hand and edited an entire album.” The result is a recording that exceeding difficult to categorize, a situation Haco/After Dinner’s music is no stranger to. Existing somewhere amidst enka, the quirky, off-kilter pop of Kate Bush, and the aforementioned field recordings, 32 years later and it’s still difficult to say that we’ve heard anything quite like Souvenir Cassette before or after its initial release.

Old copies of the initial cassette release are rare and will run nearly $70 secondhand on Discogs, so we’re thrilled by the prospect of more listeners being able to acquire and explore this recording at a far more reasonable cost with a new, cleaner master courtesy of Bob Drake. Cassette copies are limited to 100, with two different editions. The “Replica” edition is limited to 75 and replicates the original release back in ’88 by ReR Megacorp, while the “Artist” version features a a transparent case tray and transparent art insert and is limited to 25 copies, which will run you $8 and $10 respectively. The album will now also be available on minidisc for the first time in a run of 10, and deluxe CD issue is planned for the future.

 

Watch the trailer for the reissue/remaster of Souvenir Cassette:

 

You can stream remastered versions of “After Dinner”, “Sepia-Ture”, and “Cymbals at Dawn” below:

 

To listen to the original masters of these tracks in advance of the release, you can listen to Souvenir Cassette here:

 

A photo gallery of images taken from the ’87 European concert tour:

 

‘Souvenir Cassette’ is available to pre-order here now and officially releases August 30th. Be sure to follow Haco on her website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud to keep up-to-date.