Dear People of Earth,

Here's what's thrilling:

1. It is Moon's Birthday today! And this morning I was lucky enough to have a cold breakfast with Moon and Mathilda - Ice Cream Cake and the sun wasn't even up yet. Yay!

2. I know I do not have to remind you that next December 2013 is the 40th Anniversary of the Roxy Performances. Now that we have thoroughly identified all it's parts and participles, we will deliver The Movie without further incident and maybe only a little ado. In theatres, DVD and Blue-ray, sometime before December, 2013.

3. MEANWHILE . . . before this December 2012, in anticipation of The ACTUAL Movie, we are pleased to inform you that we are scheduling the release of the PREQUEL to the actual Soundtrack. Yes. You will! Appreciate the raw unbridledness of the 75 minutes and 49 seconds of Roxy without the Elsewhere. Further details on The Movie and P.S. (Prequel Soundtrack) as soon as the duckies are all lined up.

4. Oh, and did I mention a new series is about to launch - Road Tapes - on Vaulternative Records! We've taken direct aim at Halloween!

5. Thank you.

xxx,

gz

I'm not excited about having to wait another 15 months for Roxy...but it will have to do.

I really hope Road Tapes series is going to be on CD. If it's download only (like the Stones), I'm not buying.

We get a cd of the music or maybe the music that didn't make the movie

plus Mothermania

plus the new vault release Americ(a)

plus a whole new road series

my only fear is what if I don't live the 13 months.

On the subject of Road Tapes

"4. Oh, and did I mention a new series is about to launch - Road Tapes - on Vaulternative Records! We've taken direct aim at Halloween!"

She is talking in the plural...

Though perphaps is not related, I found this article where "road tapes" is mentioned:

http://mixonline.com/recording/business ... ers_sound/

(...)
"Zappa had been taping the M.O.I.'s live performances since their first gigs in 1966, and Dick Kunc made many excellent recordings on a portable setup that included an 8-channel mixer and a 2-track Uher. With Kunc gone, responsibility for making "road tapes" was delegated to various members of the road crew, including Davey Moire and George Douglas. Moire, who met Zappa during the live recordings that went into Bongo Fury (1975), joined the organization when Zappa asked him to mix FOH for the Royce Hall (UCLA) concerts, which resulted in the Orchestral Favorites album (recorded in 1975, but not released until 1979).

Though road tapes were typically recorded on a Scully 4-track at 30 ips with Telefunken C-40 noise reduction, Zappa also arranged for his guitar solos to be recorded wild onto a stereo Nagra, a technique that provided him with a ready library of solos more or less dissociated from their original accompaniment. "Frank was notorious for pulling solos off of songs that had been done years earlier," recalls Moire. "He'd pull a guitar solo off this song and put it on that song - sometimes totally different songs."

(...)
"Starting in 1980, Pinske mixed FOH on the road and, between tours, began mixing live tapes at UMRK; Tinsel Town Rebellion, a two-LP set released in 1981, was his first completed project. By this point, Zappa had a considerable backlog of 24-track remote recordings, plus an ever-expanding archive of road tapes recorded on 4-track and 1-inch 8-track. "Some of them turned out fairly decent," says Pinske. "A number of engineers had left behind some really brilliant recordings. When you pulled some of them out, you just wondered how some of these got so good.

George Douglas, who joined the organization in 1980, remembers making road tapes from a position just behind the stage with two Yamaha PM1000 consoles and a Tascam 8-track. "It was obviously less than ideal, as far as monitoring went," he notes. "After the European tour, I asked for and got a Midas 32-channel 8x8 and set up a Dolby rig and two 3M M79 24-tracks."

(...)