The Seventh Disappearance
The Vanishing of Opal and the Rise of the Unintentional Custodians
After the release of her solo album Five Ways of Disappearing, Kendra Smith pulled off her vanishing act into the woods of Northern California. Left behind in that puff of smoke were the two LPs from her previous and most recognized band, Opal: the sun-baked psychedelic shimmy of Happy Nightmare Baby and its prequel-follow-up Early Recordings, which gathers the pre-electric-warrior acoustic folk and blues sketches that trace the band’s earlier, more skeletal forms.
If Smith’s disappearance felt intentional—an aesthetic choice made flesh—what followed for those records was something stranger and less willed. They did not simply fall out of print, nor did they fade quietly into obscurity. Instead, they entered a prolonged state of suspension: talked about, passed hand to hand, remembered vividly, but increasingly unavailable in any sanctioned form. Their absence became structural rather than accidental, enforced not by time or neglect but by a thicket of rights, permissions, disputes, and second thoughts that ultimately culminated in a brief, abortive reissue campaign—and then, abruptly, a reversal.
CDs were manufactured. Some were sold. The remainder were reportedly destroyed.
This is not the familiar story of lost masters or abandoned tapes. It is a rarer, more unsettling kind of disappearance: a work that briefly re-enters the world, only to be actively withdrawn again. Not erased from history, but extracted from circulation. What remains are originals that trade hands at ever-higher prices, stray copies of the cancelled editions, and the quiet labor of listeners who refuse to let the sound itself vanish simply because its official status has been revoked.
If the first five ways of disappearing belonged to Smith, and the sixth belonged to the artist’s refusal of legibility, then this feels like a seventh—one enacted not by the musician, but by the machinery surrounding her work. A disappearance without a single author. A vanishing by committee.
And into that vacuum step the unintentional custodians.
Opal, for me, has been less about “understanding” than about simply being in its presence across my adult life.
Our copies of Happy Nightmare Baby and Early Recordings sit within the sedimentary layer we accrued decades ago as college radio DJs and music nerds—roles not mutually exclusive and often hopelessly entangled. They are the artifacts collectors now shorthand as “OG”: objects imprinted with the idiosyncrasies of 1980s independent-label production values and studio aesthetics, far removed from the near cookie-cutter spit-and-shine of “proper” remasters. You can hear the rooms. You can hear the limits. You can hear the choices that emerged because there were no better options available, only different ones.
These records don’t sound unfinished so much as un-sanded. The low mids linger. The transients aren’t disciplined into modern obedience. The mixes carry the faint smell of tape, budget constraints, and late-night decisions made without the expectation that anyone would be listening three decades later through studio monitors with opinions. What they lack in polish they retain in texture, and what they lack in clarity they compensate for in atmosphere. This is not nostalgia talking; it’s material memory.
That materiality matters because it anchors the records to a specific moment in independent music’s pre-digital ecology—a time when labels were small, studios inconsistent, and “production value” often less an aesthetic target than a negotiated truce between ambition and circumstance. To listen to these originals now is to encounter not just songs, but the conditions under which they survived their own making.
Which is why the idea of a single, definitive, future-facing remaster feels slightly beside the point. These albums were never meant to be perfected; they were meant to be carried. And for years, that’s exactly what happened—through dorm rooms, radio stations, shared apartments, and personal collections that functioned less like archives than like slow-moving geological deposits.
When the official pathways faltered, when reissues stalled or vanished outright, it wasn’t institutions that kept Opal audible. It was the sediment. The imperfect copies. The listeners who never thought of themselves as caretakers—only as people who liked the way these records sounded and refused to let them slip entirely into rumor.
For years, we treated our copies (the LP Nancy has had since the ’80s and the CDs we independently acquired in the ’90s) of Rain Parade’s Emergency Third Rail Power Trip as modestly holy relics. When a remastered reissue was announced, we jumped promptly—and kept our originals. So when the Opal reissue announcement surfaced, our ears perked up. And then… nothing.
I recently stumbled on a Variety article trumpeting the imminent release, approved by both Roback and Smith. It read like Sir John Franklin sets out bravely to discover the Northwest Passage. And then, as with Franklin: silence. Only later did we learn about the withdrawn and destroyed copies, the reasons only hinted at, the villains and heroes undefined—left to one’s imagination and biases.
And then a friend Dropboxed us AIFFs of the Early Recordings reissue, complete with four extra tracks from the Early Recordings 2 bootleg. They sound fantastic. Clear, dynamic, and unmistakably loud. They sound like every other carefully crafted professional reissue that arrives to announce itself as the official version, the proper version, the canonical version.
With the retraction of the reissue, it felt like the band’s life story repeated: they were there, then they weren’t, and if you weren’t paying attention, you might wonder if they’d been there in the first place.
But of course, the genie had long escaped the bottle. And the ghosts still wander.
Opal exists now in a thousand partial, unauthorized, algorithmically flattened incarnations: YouTube uploads ripped from vinyl with baked-in surface noise, streaming copies of uncertain provenance, blog-hosted FLACs whose lineage is murky but whose intent is obvious. The sound has already escaped the neat boundaries of permission. It circulates whether anyone signs off on it or not.
And alongside those specters, the so-called “OG” artifacts circulate as well—CDs and LPs bought when they were just records, not relics; objects worn smooth by use rather than sealed behind scarcity logic. These originals haven’t vanished. They’ve simply migrated into private hands, where they function less as collectibles than as reference points, anchors, calibration weights for memory.
That’s the quiet irony at the heart of the seventh vanishing: withdrawal doesn’t make the work disappear. It just ensures that its afterlife is unmanaged, uneven, and unofficial. Authority steps back, but sound doesn’t comply. It finds other routes. It always does.
The ethics are questionable, the legality less gray than red. The economics opaque and very likely unfair. The artists’ intent and wishes? Get a Ouija board for David Roback. As for Kendra Smith—does she even have an email address?
In that context, custodianship becomes both transgressive and basic hygiene. Rescue and rebellion, violation and maintenance. Keeping the signal intelligible amid the noise. Knowing where a copy came from. Remembering how it sounded before normalization, before recontextualization, before the ghosts took over.
The canon hasn’t been replaced. It’s been outpaced.
What remains are listeners who understand that once a record has been heard, it cannot be fully recalled—only remembered, imperfectly, pluralistically, through whatever artifacts remain at hand. Some of those artifacts are pressed in plastic. Some live on hard drives. Some are carried in heads. None of them are official anymore, and none of them need to be.
At this point, the choice isn’t between preservation and loss.
It’s between care and indifference.
And care, as you’ve already discovered, doesn’t require permission.