Rare Prince recordings set for reissue next month

A downside of Prince’s fierce desire to own the rights to his music is that he took many recordings out of circulation, apparently figuring if he couldn’t make what he felt he deserved, no one would.

Many titles have been reissued in the years since his death in April 2016, and his estate will release three titles through Sony Music on Sept. 13 that have long been unavailable as physical products — the 1996 albums Emancipation and Chaos and Disorder, and the rare cassette-only Versace Experience (Prelude 2 Gold).

Chaos and Disorder was Prince’s final album of new material through his original deal with Warner Bros., and Emancipation — the title referencing his freedom from that Warner deal — is a triple-cd set released through EMI later in 1996. Both albums will be released on vinyl (purple vinyl, no less) for the first time next month.

It was a dispute over Warner issuing his music too slowly that saw the quirky artist adopt a symbol as his name and gallop through recordings to end his contract. He released five albums between 1994 and 1996, then signed with Arista in 1998.

The symbol, like some kind of gender motif with a trumpet and later to be known as Love Symbol #2, left fans bemused but mostly accepting as just one of those things he did, like wear all purple or all peach for periods of his career.

At the time, he was referred to as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, or just The Artist, and sometimes appeared with the word “slave” scrawled on his face, a reference to his contract dispute with Warner.

The Versace Experience (Prelude 2 Gold) was originally a limited-edition promotional-only cassette of previously unreleased material given to attendees of the Versace runway at Paris Fashion Week in July 1995.

A first glimpse of Prince’s then-upcoming Gold Experience, the cassette featured remixed versions of the album’s songs P. Control, Gold and Eye Hate U as well as rare unreleased music by The New Power Generation, The NPG Orchestra and Prince’s jazz-fusion project Madhouse.

Many tracks — not available in the same form elsewhere — were remixed or edited specifically to make the cassette “its own seamless sonic universe,” according to the announcement, as well as a rare Prince collectible. A reproduction of the cassette was released in another limited edition for Record Store Day 2019. It will now be available on CD and vinyl.