September 10, 2003

A decade after a bitter breakup, seminal alternative rock act the Pixies may reunite next year. At deadline, rumors of a tour and a potential new studio album remain unconfirmed. The manger of frontman Frank Black (aka Black Francis) tells Billboard.com, “I have received an offer for the Pixies to perform in April. That said, over the past 10 years, I have received dozens of offers for the Pixies.” A spokesperson for the group’s former label, 4AD, had no comment on potential reunion plans.
The group’s last major tour came while supporting U2 on a number of U.S. dates on the 1992 Zoo TV trek. Goldenvoice Promotions head Paul Tollett tells Billboard.com he has tried to book the Pixies “every year” for the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif. “I still haven’t made any movement,” he reports. “[I’m] not sure if they are speaking to each other.”
Source Billboard.com.

Rhino Records/Warner Archives has set a Nov. 11 release date for “Once in a Lifetime,” a box set condensing the career of punk/pop iconoclasts Talking Heads. The three-CD, one-DVD set was compiled with the help of all four band members, who have not been on good terms since splitting in 1991.
The CD portion of “Once in a Lifetime” will comprise most of the band’s hits as well as rarities and favorite album cuts. Well-known tracks such as “Psycho Killer,” “Take Me to the River,” “Life During Wartime,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “Burning Down the House,” “And She Was” and “Wild Wild Life” will sit alongside cuts such as “Pulled Up,” “Heaven,” “Slippery People,” “Houses in Motion” and “Sugar on My Tongue.”
Five previously unreleased tracks also find their way onto the audio discs — “In Asking Land” is an outtake from sessions for the group’s 1988 album “Naked” and it joins alternate versions of “Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town,” “New Feeling,” “Cities” and “Drugs.” Also featured is “A Clean Break (live),” a cut taken from the 1982 double-live LP “The Name of This Band is Talking Heads,” which has never been released on CD.
The box’s DVD is an upgrade of the 1988 VHS release “Storytelling Giant,” which features all of the band’s music videos. The disc will also include three videos that weren’t featured on that item’s initial release — “Blind,” “(Nothing But) Flowers” and “Sax and Violins,” a track that originally appeared on the 1991 soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film “Until the End of the World.”
Source Billboard.com.

Who knew: big black holes sing bass. One particularly monstrous black hole has probably been humming B flat for billions of years, but at a pitch no human could hear, let alone sing, astronomers revealed yesterday (Sept. 9).
“The intensity of the sound is comparable to human speech,” said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge. But the pitch of the sound is about 57 octaves below middle C, roughly the middle of a standard piano keyboard. This is far, far deeper than humans can hear, the researchers said, and they believe it is the deepest note ever detected in the universe.
The sound is emanating from the Perseus Cluster, a giant clump of galaxies some 250 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km), the distance light travels in a year.
Source Billboard.com.