Don Fleming, archivist for the Lou Reed Archive

What’s the story of this reissue?

I’ve been working with Laurie Anderson and the Lou Reed Estate since after Lou passed away to help find a home for Lou’s archive, which we eventually found at New York Public Library. That’s now continued into doing stuff with the archive. What can we put out there to be accessed by the public, non-commercially, as free access as possible? And what can we do that’s more commercial? Hudson River Wind Meditations is one of the things that came up. It had fallen out of print. It was put out with this small New Age label – I think because they sold it at a kiosk at Starbucks or something? I don’t know if it was utterly rejected by Lou’s labels at the time, Hal [Willner, producer, who passed away in April 2020] didn’t seem to know. So Animal Lab studios was Lou’s apartment? That’s what Hal said. There’s a little alcove on the second floor that had his studio in it – just a small workstation. This is around the time Lou got really into keyboards. There was a Moog Voyager that was one of his favourites – he talked about that in interviews as being like the new Stradivarius of electronic instruments, he was just way into it. Hal said Lou recorded at night then he’d play it for Hal the next day and they’d make loops of it. At this time he was working with Sarth Calhoun of Metal Machine Trio, and there’s a whole series of songs they recorded that haven’t yet come out. That would have been recorded at Animal Lab – I don’t think there was a budget to take it into a studio in town. INTERVIEW: LOUIS PATTISON