After collaborating on a full-album cover of Yanni’s ‘Live at the Acropolis’ last summer, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has now tapped Beck to produce his third solo album, titled ‘Benediction’ and due out sometime in 2011 on Matador Records.

Sonic Youth will reissue two more early albums — 1985’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and 1987’s ‘Sister’ — on 180-gram audiophile vinyl in the coming weeks as they prep a French film soundtrack to be released as SYR9 in the Sonic Youth Recordings series and mix a new live album recorded in 1985.

With Alan Wilder and Vince Clarke on board, Depeche Mode fans are abuzz over the possibility that all five past and present members will appear on disc together for the first time on a new remix album reported to be in the works.

New Zealand alt-pop act The Chills will celebrate its 30th anniversary later this month with a concert at the site of the band’s Nov. 15, 1980, live debut — plus, the group plans to release a live album with two “rudimentary” recordings from that first concert.

The new album from Duran Duran — ‘All You Need is Now,’ which Nick Rhodes declares ‘the best record we’ve made in over two decades’ — will be released exclusively on iTunes on Dec. 21, but won’t come out on CD until February.

J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr will tone things down considerably next spring with the release of his first proper solo album, an acoustic — and apparently drum-free — collection called ‘Several Shades of Why.’

Former Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin says he and Robert Smith have discussed recording a second album as The Glove — the duo’s short-lived early-’80s side project — and that The Cure’s frontman tells him, ‘It’s just a matter of time.’