A string of rare Prince recordings are on their way, thanks to the Prince estate, which made the announcement on Friday, and Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment.
The albums, which the estate calls “Essential Prince titles,” will be available for purchase on Friday, Sept. 13. One will be “The VERSACE Experience (Prelude 2 Gold),” while the others will be the LPs “Chaos and Disorder,” as well as the three-hour long “Emancipation.” And both have been out on physical print for two decades.
Both of those albums, originally released in 1996, will be offered on CD, as well as purple vinyl.
As for “The VERSACE Experience (Prelude 2 Gold),” it was originally released as a promotional cassette tape for the Versace runway show at Paris Fashion Week, and it contained a bunch of unreleased songs that were given to guests at that time.
The tape was a lead-up to Prince’s “The Gold Experience” LP, released that same year and it also has remixes of the cuts “P. Control,” “Gold,” and “Eye Hate U,” as well as unreleased songs from Prince’s backup band The New Power Generation.
Limited editions of that tape were also released earlier this year on April 13 for Record Store Day, but now it’ll be available to everyone on CD and vinyl.
Both “Chaos and Disorder” and the “Emancipation” albums came at a time when Prince was still battling with his then record label Warner Bros, which he desperately tried to free himself from.
In fact, Prince refused to promote “Chaos and Disorder” because of the horrible relationship, but it still reached the No. 14 mark in the U.K. and number 26 on the Billboard 200 chart in the U.S.
“Emancipation,” meanwhile, was released on Prince’s own NPG label, and he dropped it when he finally left Warner Bros.
The three reissued projects can be purchased individually or altogether as a bundle package, according to the estate.
