Smashing Pumpkins Announce Record Club

The Smashing Pumpkins announced today that they will host a new “record club” through their website. Although there aren’t a ton of details now, you can sign up here to join the club for the price of your email address. Signing up will get you the record club’s first release — a demo version of the single “Drown.”

“This was done on my Tascam 688 recorder—8 tracks to cassette,” Corgan said. “I would have been the engineer, so blame me for the lack of fidelity, but in a way it’s kind of exciting because you get a sense of what the band sounded like unfiltered, playing the song live.”

The track is in a long, unedited form, which Corgan explains was used to decide what to keep on the track.

“This is actually what the band would have used at the time to listen to the song back and make decisions about what became the eventual recording of ‘Drown,’” Corgan said on the Smashing Pumpkins’ website. “And as you’ll see there are some minor differences from what became the version on the Singles soundtrack.”

Corgan wrote in June that he would go through a huge archiving process of old Smashing Pumpkins demo recordings. The singer said on his LiveJournal that he was looking for a way to release some of these archives. The record club sure does sound a lot like that project.

“A few days ago I started to listen through, in no particular order, to demo tapes related to those early years, and found a lot of ideas that sounded fresh and interesting to me, considering I know now the outcome of those different approaches and interests as I was laying them out then in pursuit of a new sound,” Corgan said on his LiveJournal. “Most of the materials would be of little interest to the mainstream fan, but the beauty is we can release these ideas and snippets if we can find the right way to do so.”

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