XLIIs presents collections of Grateful Dead live recordings — complete shows, sourced from the highest-quality tapes available, with historical documentation for every performance.
The four collections in XLIIs are on loan from collectors around the world. Each collector spent years — sometimes decades — assembling a set of recordings around a single idea: a particular era of the band, a specific sound engineer, a run of shows that changed something. We present their collections as they organized them, with their original cassettes and J-card inserts photographed for the app.
The archive holds 170 complete shows across four collections, spanning 1969 through 1980. Additional collections are coming, but not on a fixed schedule.
We commissioned Marta Vidal, a printmaker in Porto, to create the artwork for all four collections in hand-carved rubber stamps.
XLII is the designation for Type II high-bias cassette tape — the tape that Dead tapers used to record and trade live shows. Maxell XLII. TDK SA. The good stuff. The name is a nod to those tapes and the culture of collecting and sharing them.