Almost 20 years after its intended 1977 release, this previously unissued four-LP box set (three CDs) is now commercially available for the first time. With its mix of live rock performances, orchestral works, musique concrete, jazz compositions, guitar improvisations, sci-fi musicals, cartoon soundtracks and enema bandits, LÄTHER is a veritable smörgasbord of Zappa delights. Produced by Zappa in 1977, LÄTHER (pronounced leather) features unreleased tracks, unreleased versions of familiar tunes and alternate mixes and edits of tracks that appeared on four separate albums in 1978 and 1979 (ZAPPA IN NEW YORK, STUDIO TAN, SLEEP DIRT and ORCHESTRAL FAVORITES). In addition to LÄTHER's two hours and 40 minutes of music, the staff at Zappa's recording studio, the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen (UMRK), has unearthed four nuggets from the Zappa vault and assembled them into a 20-minute bonus at the end of the program, bringing the total listening experience to three hours. Legal hassles with Warner Bros., Zappa's record company at the time, prevented the original release of LÄTHER. Stories vary, but according to Gail Zappa, Zappa conceived LÄTHER as a four-album box set which Warner Bros. declined to release. The label then thwarted Zappa's attempts to release it elsewhere by threatening legal action. It was then that Zappa reluctantly reformatted some of LÄTHER's material into separate albums, and delivered them to the record company in an effort to fulfill his contractual obligations. Zappa alleged that Warner Bros. refused to pay him for the material, so he declared them in breach and the lawsuits began. Zappa took matters into his own hands in December 1977 by playing the entire work on Pasadena's KROQ radio station and instructing listeners to tape it. He said, "This is Frank Zappa as your bogus temporary disc jockey making it possible for you to run your little cassette machine and tape an album which is perhaps never going to be available to the public at large." The unorthodox radio broadcast, plus a few reviews of LÄTHER that found their way into the press at the time, helped to solidify the album's reputation as a masterpiece and made it the stuff of legend. The breadth and depth of musical virtuosity in evidence on LÄTHER makes it not only a top request from Zappa fans, but an important missing piece in the recorded history of one of modern music's most inspired and original composers.