Sonic Youth have launched an archive of live concert recordings

They were one of the world’s most impressive live groups, and now Sonic Youth have begun releasing recordings of old shows at part of an ongoing live archival program.

Last month marked the 30th anniversary of Sonic Youth’s seminal 1988 album, Daydream Nation. While the group already kicking off the occasion by selling off some old studio and tour gear, Pitchfork notes that the band have now officially launched an archive of live audio and video recordings.

Released via Nugs, the archive so far features six recordings, dating from 1988 to one of their final shows back in 2011.

“Through the years and as the times changed we recorded our live shows as often as we could, on cassettes, DATs, CD-Rs and later on multi-track recorders,” explained Sonic Youth drummer Steven Shelley.

“We collected fan-generated audience tapes, shady bootlegs and anything we could get our hands on. We now maintain an archive of hundreds of hours of Sonic Youth concerts and we’d like to share some of our favorites.”

“Sonic Youth’s music has influenced innumerable artists across many different genres, past, present, and will continue to do so into the future,” added Nugs founder and CEO, Brad Serling.

“For fans this is an incredible opportunity to revisit what they delivered as a live band touring the planet for three decades.”

While only half a dozen audio recordings have been released so far (and one video recording), plenty more recordings are set to be uploaded to Nugs in the near future, meaning fans will be able to have an incredibly healthy catalogue of live Sonic Youth material in no time.

Although Sonic Youth broke up back in 2011, the band have been celebrating Daydream Nation‘s anniversary with a series of film events across America. No word as to if these will be making their way down to Australia, but we can only hope.