Speaking to Resident Advisor at Dekmantel Festival in 2016, the Dutch DJ Young Marco observed that the reasons behind a growing interest in older music were pretty simple. "Some music is just timeless," he said. "It's about people in the right place at the right time, with the right instruments." The 2010s saw a boom in archival and retrospective releases, as tried-and-tested ways of accumulating music knowledge (record shops, radio, clubs) were supplemented by the infinite wormholes of musical discovery offered by sites like Discogs and YouTube. The rise of reissues posed all kinds of questions. Does an obsession with the past block the path for new artists? Or does it pave the way for artists who lacked the distribution tools the first time round to have their music heard and loved?

Reissue culture showed no sign of abating in the 2010s, as several waves of shops and labels emerged with a focus on unearthing and recontextualising old music for new audiences. This list rounds up our 20 favourite reissues of the past ten years.

Listen to highlights from the definitive reissues of the 2010s on Spotify, Apple Music and Buy Music Club.

- 2010 / 2011
  Virgo Four
  Virgo / It's A Crime Remixes
  Rush Hour
  
  Virgo: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
  It's A Crime: Bandcamp / Apple Music
- Did reissues dominate your personal end-of-decade lists? Then you probably owe a debt to Rush Hour. Repressing records since the mid '00s, the Amsterdam label (and its affiliated DJs) helped create the hype around the culture. A key early driver was the first-ever repress of Virgo by the Chicago duo of the same name (AKA Virgo Four). Though many consider the LP one of the greatest in house music history, it had flown under the radar outside of nerdy circles, due in large part to the low-key, promo-shy attitude of its makers, Merwyn Sanders and Eric Lewis. The repress changed all that, giving these eight dreamy gems the day in the sun they deserved.
  
  Rush Hour didn't stop there. In March, 2011, came Resurrection, a 15-track compilation of demos recorded by Sanders and Lewis between 1984 and 1990. One of these cuts, a sunny vocal smash called "It's A Crime," was pounced on by Caribou and Hunee, who delivered two festival-ready remixes with big basslines and catchy hooks. Suddenly, every promoter on the planet wanted a piece of Virgo Four. It didn't end well—Sanders, unbeknownst to many, split from the duo in 2011, only to be replaced, reportedly without his approval, by Lewis's cousin. Sanders wasn't happy. Had it all been worth it? For him, it's hard to say. For house music? It's a resounding yes.
  
  - Carlos Hawthorn
- 2012
  Ruff Sqwad
  White Label Classics
  No Hats No Hoods
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- At Glastonbury 2019, two viral moments echoed louder than the rest. On the Sunday of the festival, a 15-year-old named Alex (now with the de facto surname "From Glasto") got on stage alongside rapper Dave and bodied a word-perfection rendition of "Thiago Silva," Dave's hit with AJ Tracey. Two nights prior, Stormzy was left speechless as 80,000 people chanted the melody to breakout anthem "Shut Up" back at him during a history-making headline set. Both moments originated with a gaggle of teenagers from Bow E3, huddled around Packard Bell computers with copies of FruityLoops. They called themselves Ruff Sqwad. Their music formed the heart of a 21st-century British cultural movement without equal.
  
  It wasn't just "Functions On The Low" (the beat for "Shut Up") or "Pied Piper" (flipped on "Thiago Silva") that would have resonated with the young crowd. Ruff Sqwad's style of "sad spaceship music," as Slackk termed it in Dan Hancox's book Inner City Pressure, are part of grime history, mined on pirate radio shows and generating countless righteous rewinds in the dance. White Label Classics, which gathered rare records from the group's 2003-2006 run in one place, showed just how diverse the group’s output was. The tunes belonging to producer Rapid, like "Clio" and "Lethal Injection," are chunky and powerful, their rough edges left defiantly unsmoothed. Dirty Danger goes the other way on "Died In Your Arms" and "Together," chopping up clap-along anthems by Cutting Crew and The Police into surprisingly vulnerable fare for a scene anchored in sparring.
  
  How is it that all this still sounds as good filling the TV sets of millions as they did blasting from Nokias on the back of night buses? Fundamentally, Ruff Sqwad were unrivalled in bringing out all the poignancy, complexity and rawness of human emotion. The bass is as murky as tar pits, the synthetic horns blare with urgency and the square-wave synths seem to stand 50 feet tall. Listening to White Label Classics, it's clear that practical limitations were no impediment to ambition. Bound up in these instrumentals are a generation's memories. The fidelity is rough, the ingenuity is a marvel, the music is timeless.
  
  - Gabriel Szatan
- 2012
  Porter Ricks
  Biokinetics
  Type Records
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Basic Channel and its Chain Reaction sublabel had already provided the blueprint for dub techno by the time Biokinetics first appeared in 1996. But Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner's debut LP was the first to show the emerging sound's potential outside the confines of a DJ 12-inch. It was also the finest full-length statement to ever emerge from the Chain Reaction stable.
  
  Yet before Type reissued Biokinetics in 2012, Porter Ricks were an overlooked cult favourite, with Monolake, Vladislav Delay and DJ Pete often coming more readily to mind. But more than any of those other artists—apart from Basic Channel themselves—Porter Ricks showed how dub techno's extended studio technique opened doors for what would later be called dance music deconstructions.
  
  Porter Ricks were masters of teasing out a world of subtleties from studio noise, conjuring vivid images of rainstorms and arctic winds that suggested both the power and timelessness of nature. Harnessing these textures to the heartbeat thud of Berlin techno put these images into motion—this was music that seemingly existed long ago, visited us for a moment, then continued off into the distance, probably till time's end. That this reissue arrived in the same year as decade-defining albums like Actress's R.I.P and Lee Gamble's Diversions 1994-1996 is telling because Biokinetics pointed more clearly to those modern sounds than most of their illustrious contemporaries.
  
  - Mark Smith
- 2012 / 2015
  Various Artists: Trevor Jackson Presents
  Metal Dance / Metal Dance 2 / Science Fiction Dancehall
  Strut / On-U Sound
  
  Metal Dance: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
  Metal Dance 2: Bandcamp / Spotify
  Science Fiction: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Trevor Jackson spent much of the decade rooting around in the archives, inventing his own alternative histories of the 1980s—the era in which he came of age, making his name as a designer of acid house record sleeves. The first of these alt-histories was 2012's Metal Dance (joined later that year by Metal Dance 2), which rounded up all manner of misshapes and freaks from the already freakishly misshapen worlds of industrial, EBM and post-punk. The title is instructive: the 28 tracks on the first compilation are cold as steel, typically arranged to ensure that minimal human warmth is transmitted. Drums clatter, melodies clang and voices appear in gloomy monotone. This is alienated music for cold war death discos. Still, the Metal Dance template is elastic. A sinister groove feels playful and poppy in the hands of D.A.F., while Alien Sex Fiend conduct a ritual dance that's part Balearic, part bloody rock & roll. These tracks are a reminder of the provocation at the heart of industrial music, making brazen gestures towards kinky sex and totalitarian aesthetics with every S&M shriek and steel-toed stomp.
  
  Jackson's other archival achievement was 2015's Science Fiction Dancehall, a compilation highlighting the parallel dub universe in which various non-Jamaican artists operated during the '80s. The 27 tracks, drawn from Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound stable, find the likes of African Head Charge, Tackhead, Little Annie and Steve Beresford applying the logic of dub—and the idea of the studio as an instrument—to an expanding electronic universe of new wave, disco and hip-hop. There are faint strains of Yellow Magic Orchestra and emergent electro (The Missing Brazilians), the dubwise grooves of punk-funk (Ari Up's New Age Steppers) and the vinyl scratch of early hip-hop (The Pop Group's Mark Stewart). By highlighting the most danceable tracks from the On-U vaults, Jackson flagged up the audio futurism that inspired his own Output label. In the 2010s, the word "curator" became virtually meaningless through overuse, but Jackson lived up to the accolade on these deeply personal musical histories.
  
  - Chal Ravens
- 2013
  William Onyeabor
  Who Is William Onyeabor?
  Luaka Bop
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Occasionally, very occasionally, there is a reissue that flips the music world on its head, challenging certain assumptions. Think Charanjit Singh coaxing acid-style squiggles out of his Roland TB-303 in 1982. Or the career revival of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure Detroit-area musician whose songs became anti-apartheid anthems in South Africa. The reissue of William Onyeabor's entire '70s and '80s catalogue, starting with the best-of compilation Who Is William Onyeabor?, was one of these paradigm shifts.
  
  Running a film company, a pressing plant and a recording studio out of Enugu, Nigeria, Onyeabor may or may not have been equipped with synths and funding from a Russian backer after studying in Moscow. We'll never know, because by the time Luaka Bop found him, and up until he passed in 2017, all he wanted to talk about was Jesus. Whatever the case may be, this shit jams. Onyeabor mastered a kind of prescient future funk, infusing the local Nigerian rhythm with sequencers and synthesizers. His Wilfilms Records Label pressed up all-time classics like "Why Go To War," "Fantastic Man" and "When The Going Is Smooth & Good," records that were previously so rare and singular they seemed apocryphal.
  
  - Matt McDermott
- 2013 / 2015 / 2017
  Patrick Cowley
  School Daze / Muscle Up / Afternooners
  Dark Entries
  
  School Daze: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
  Muscle Up: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
  Afternooners: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Patrick Cowley is one of the most important artists in electronic music, but his legacy was left in fragments until Dark Entries came along. Best known for his hi-NRG hits, production for Sylvester and a Donna Summer remix, the American artist's body of music was in fact much deeper. Dark Entries focused on the eerie synth music that Cowley made from the early '70s up until his death from AIDS in 1982, much of which he gave to the Los Angeles gay porn house Fox Studio to use in their films.
  
  The three albums that came out of these archives both challenge our idea of porn music and retain the funk and melodrama associated with vintage gay porn. Most importantly, they show Cowley not just as a savvy dance and pop producer but as a synth virtuoso, working state-of-the-art machines at a time when most people were befuddled by them. What's more impressive is the ground covered here—"Seven Sacred Pools" could be the latest private press New Age reissue, while "The Jungle Dream" sounds like it came from an old Emeralds tape. The music ranges from playful to pensive, offering a view into Cowley's talent away from the dance floor. Dark Entries became the most prolific reissue label of the past ten years, and none of its releases were as important or eye-opening as these.
  
  - Andrew Ryce
- 2013
  Various
  I Am The Center (Private Issue New Age Music In America, 1950-1990)
  Light In The Attic
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Is there any better way to mark the passing of time than the critical reevaluation of cultural artefacts previously relegated to the dustbin of history? At the turn of the century, the New Age section was among the most neglected at the record store, with only a dedicated few able to separate the wheat (Mark Isham, Steve Roach) from the chaff (Kitaro, Mannheim Steamroller). 15 years later, those same New Age sections are picked over and full of reissues, thanks in no small part to lovingly curated compilations like I Am The Center.
  
  The voluminous box set, which came packaged with starry-eyed paintings and a detailed booklet, was intent on nothing less than image rehabilitation. Specifically, Douglas Mcgowan's compilation set out to wrest New Age from the clutches of questionable taste, recontextualizing the music as the product of DIY communities aiming for transcendence. The dulcimer and ambience-heavy set did just that, introducing the world to little-known visionaries like Master Wilburn Burchette and Joanna Brouk, and cherry-picking from the catalogues of well-known practitioners like Michael Stearns and Steven Halpern. This stunning body of music bursts with the contagious energy present at the origins and outskirts of any vital genre.
  
  - Matt McDermott
- 2013 / 2015
  Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye / Ata Kak: Obaa Sima
  Awesome Tapes from Africa
  
  Shemonmuanaye: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
  Obaa Sima: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- "I bought this on the street from a guy selling tapes displayed on one of those big, vertical wooden racks in Cape Coast, Ghana," wrote a man named Brian Shimkovitz on a blog post timestamped 5:43 AM on a Saturday in 2006. "No one I know in Ghana listens to this frenetic leftfield rap madness." The blog was titled Awesome Tapes From Africa, and its opening dispatch linked to an upload titled "Moma Yendodo" off a promisingly oddball cassette cover. The words "ATA KAK," stacked in tones of lemon and Cheeto above a photo of a man shouting in sunglasses, would come out on Shimkovitz's label of the same name nine years later.
  
  Ata Kak's ecstatic Twi jabber launched a fascination with Ghanian music across diasporic-leaning record collectors and fairweather fans interested in mutant sounds. Before that came another winner: a cab driver named Hailu Mergia, whose tape, Shemonmuanaye, filled with wily organs and dolorous triple-meters offered, for many, an entry-point into the world of Ethiopian jazz. But thus was the rub at the core of the effort: the blog's thrill-soaked and cavalier approach to sharing music was met with larger questions of how to address the chasm between the record-digger and the record-digged. As such, in light of public demand to both Mergia and Ata Kak's work, plus a bit of self-awareness toward the power/profit imbalance, Shimkovitz underwent several years-long hunts for the two artists across the globe. Both now tour worldwide. As he concluded on the same early-morning post in 2006, we "may never hear anything else like this elsewhere."
  
  - Mina Tavakoli
- 2015
  The True Underground Sound Of Rome
  The Bermuda Triangle
  Vibraphone Records
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- In the 2010s, a spate of so-called "dream house" compilations hit the market, bringing many ludicrously expensive records to a wider audience, and opening up a largely unknown niche in the history of Italy's electronic landscape. It was a sound both pumping and lustrous: a descendent of Daniele Baldelli's shaggy Cosmic tapes, a cousin of the supple deep house made by Chicagoans like Vincent Floyd and Larry Heard, and an evident influence on the misty-eyed, million-selling trance of Robert Miles. The best of the bunch came from the Roman label Vibraphone Records, whose distinctive sky-blue swirl matched the airborne and graceful music within.
  
  It gets knotty working out who did what at Vibraphone, as they seemed to roll out a new alias for just about every release, but between 1992 and '93 the label's production team minted various classics of the form. Minimal Vision's 2 and a self-titled EP called The Bermuda Triangle were the standouts, with the latter getting a retitled reissue in 2015 that serves as the best entry point into this microscene. For years, tunes like "After Glow" and "Marine Sulphur Queen" were inescapable at daytime festivals and on early-morning dance floors. Mauro Tannino, essentially Vibraphone's main man, died young in an accident and never got to see the re-evaluation of his work. It makes a pair of new songs here by his former bandmates dedicated to his memory ("Tanna" and "Star Ariel") all the more moving. Italian dream house caught on this decade because it evokes all the right sensations. Cue the records up and unleash a blaze of sunlight that feels simultaneously alluring, calming and uplifting.
  
  - Gabriel Szatan
- 2015
  Fatima Yamaha
  What's A Girl To Do?
  Dekmantel
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- This is the power of the reissue in full effect. When Dekmantel re-released "What's A Girl To Do?," it had been a low-key favourite of the Irish and Scottish club scenes for over a decade, a gorgeous, gentle electro anthem that wasn't widely known elsewhere. Originally released on the Irish label D1 Recordings in 2004, it sat on the B2 among three similarly synth-fuelled electro and house tracks. Skip forward to the end of 2015, and my personal memory of the track is standing across from a tipsy George FitzGerald in the BBC Radio 1 studio as he sang along to its melody live on air. By that point, all you had to do was start humming the tune and most people interested in dance music knew exactly what it was. The latent potential of "What's A Girl To Do?" had been unleashed.
  
  The hype was fuelled by the fact that Bas Bron, the Dutch artist behind the track, remained in the shadows, until a performance live at Boiler Room's Dekmantel stage in August 2015 put a face to the music. According to a short Boiler Room documentary, the initial plan was for a female musician to appear in Bron's place, though this was discarded as a bad idea. Bron wound up appearing and revealed himself as a skilled keys player, the type of musician who you could easily imagine writing a tune this infectious. He's now a popular live performer, but his enduring contribution to dance music was given shape the day he sat down at his synth and wrote that melody.
  
  - Ryan Keeling
- 2015
  Mariah
  うたかたの日々
   Palto Flats
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- The decade's insatiable appetite for Japanese reissues is perhaps best summed up by the story of Utakata No Hibi, a record that had virtually zero international profile for more than 20 years until a horde of hungry crate-diggers discovered it at the beginning of the 2010s. Reissued by Palto Flats in 2015, the sixth album by the Tokyo band Mariah is a colossal feat of Fourth World imagineering, a fusion of East Asian and Middle Eastern sounds with elements of post-punk, ambient, no wave and synth pop.
  
  When the album was first released in 1983, Mariah were known as a jazz fusion unit; Utakata No Hibi, was an outlier in their catalog. For a start, there were the strange vocals, sung half in Japanese and half in Armenian. This was the input of temporary band members Seta Evanian, an Armenian who was married to Mariah bassist Morio Watanabe, and Julie Fowell, an Australian visual artist. The two of them collaborated on the lyrics to create vocal parts that sound richly poetic, even to those who speak neither language. Then there was the abundance of new musical ideas plucked from around the world: angular guitars from downtown New York, propulsive drums from British art-punks and shimmering synth melodies from Japanese City Pop. The melancholy "Shinzo No Tobira," one of the first Mariah tracks to find a cult following outside Japan, undercuts its saccharine melodies with sawing guitars and a dubby bassline (which disco diggers may have picked up on as a spooky premonition of Metro Area's 2002 anthem "Miura"). The buzzing thumb piano of "Shonen" reflected band leader Yasuaki Shimizu's interest in African traditions, while the bright tone-clusters of "Shisen" sounded unmistakably Japanese.
  
  The result is an album that feels both out of time and out of space, an experiment in sound collage that arrived just as Brian Eno and Jon Hassell were laying out their own ideas for "possible musics." In 2015, when Palto Flats' sumptuous reissue finally sated collectors' appetites, Utakata No Hibi still represented a hidden abundance of wamono, as these vintage records are known in Japan. Five years later, record shop shelves creak under the weight of Japanese music from artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Midori Takada. Few, though, wear the "cult classic" label as stylishly as Utakata No Hibi.
  
  - Chal Ravens
- 2016
  Various
  Digital Zandoli
  Heavenly Sweetness
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Around the summer of 2016, a number of high-profile DJs began slipping zouk tunes into their sets. This was thanks to Digital Zandoli, a compilation put together by Julien Achard and Nicolas Skliris for the French label Heavenly Sweetness. The compilation, which pulled together a selection of '80s zouk gems from the French-speaking Caribbean, happily drifted among the breezy disco, house, jazz-funk and boogie played by the likes of Hunee, Antal and Palms Trax. These tunes seemed tailor-made for beachside festival sets, whether they were slow and sultry—a style termed "zouk love"—or the more upbeat, cheerful numbers characterised as "zouk béto."
  
  You could hear zouk in nightclubs pre-Digital Zandoli if you knew where to look—it's long been a staple sound at Afro-diasporic venues in Paris, for example—but this compilation sparked a fresh wave of interest and appreciation, turning a new generation of DJs and dancers onto zouk and its main practitioners, like Pierre-Edouard Decimus. Music as beautiful as this was always going to find a wider audience eventually—and Digital Zandoli helped make that happen.
  
  - Aaron Coultate
- 2016
  V.O.
  Mashisa
  Invisible City Editions
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- The final days of South Africa's apartheid gave birth to some of the country's most political music. In the late '80s, bubblegum took reign over the South African music industry, with pop and disco-driven synths and coded lyrics making the genre palatable for the strictly censored airwaves. A decade later, Kwaito swept the country, drawing from UK house and hip-hop to express the mood of the marginalized black townships. In the midst of these sonic shifts, a teenaged Eddie Magwaza was making Mashisa, a short record created for the popular, high-energy township dance called pantsula. Upon its initial release in the '90s, Mashisa barely made a dent in the country's music scene. In fact, Magwaza would be shot and killed before the project's eventual success.
  
  Mashisa finally gained international recognition in 2016, when the leading track, "Mashisa (Dub Mix)," captured the attention of taste-making DJs across the globe. That same year, the record's integration into the mainstream was established even further when Invisible City picked up the record, reissuing four of its six tracks. "Mashisa (Dub Mix)"'s breathy synths, swinging cowbells, playful chants and dubby bassline create something irresistibly vibrant and energetic. Other tracks on the record take cues from international trends, incorporating Italo influences on "Malunde" and early house music on "She's My Lady." Magwaza might not have lived to see the legacy of his work, but this reissue offers a portal into a pivotal era of South African history—and it's a sweet listen, too.
  
  - Kiana Mickles
- 2017
  Alice Coltrane
  World Spirituality Classics
  Luaka Bop
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- The talent and impact of Alice Coltrane isn't one that can be neatly packaged in one reissue (nor a two-paragraph blurb). That's why this decade saw nearly every one of her albums repressed for a new generation of appreciators. The most striking of which came from Luaka Bop, the New York label founded by David Byrne. World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda compiles four cassette albums she made in the '80s and '90s, primarily for the community at the Sai Anantam Ashram, which she founded in 1983 and lead until her death in 2007. It was released ten years after her passing, though members of her ashram would prefer to use the word ascension. (Soon after this reissue's release, the ashram burned down in the 2018 California Woosley wildfire. It had closed the previous year.) One of those cassettes, Turiya Sings, marked the first time Coltrane recorded her voice and the first time the members of the ashram heard her voice—because God asked her to sing.
  
  Alice Coltrane's 1968 debut solo album, A Monastic Trio, made in the wake of her late husband John's sudden passing, lays bare her grief as she begins her solo journey to spirituality, marrying the sound of the harp he inadvertently left for her with her jazz and Detroit hometown foundations. (She worked alongside fellow visionary Pharoah Sanders on the record.) The 1971 spiritual jazz masterpiece Journey In Satchidananda sees Coltrane still grappling with her husband's death, though her genre-defying material, again featuring Sanders, reaches further past earthly limits. Over the next decade, her work became devotional as she evolved into Swamini A.C. Turiyasangitananda. At Sai Anantam Ashram, she made music for, and only for, her community and, finally, we hear joy. So much joy. That's the person that World Spirituality Classics wants to properly introduce you to. There's rhythmic call-and-response chanting by ashram members, radiant organ chords, stirring string orchestrations and that harp, now jubilant—all anchored by her commanding (in presence only) yet gentle and careful voice, as if she's reassuring members that they can put their faith in her. It's wonderful the rest of the world knows they can now, too.
  
  - Marissa Cetin
- 2017
  Various
  Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992
  Music From Memory
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Launched in 2013 out of Amsterdam, Music From Memory is a paragon of taste in the reissue world. As diggers and globetrotting DJs, label heads Tako and Jamie Tiller are preternaturally skilled at finding records that slip through the cracks of history and genre, between New Age, ambient, post-punk, wave and just about any other music recorded at home with a synthesizer. The label's crowning jewel is Outro Tempo. We were at least prepared for contemporary New Age to be as good as Gaussian Curve, or Japanese synth-pop as pristine as Dip In The Pool, but very few of us were ready for what John Gómez dug up in Brazil.
  
  To get there, the London-based DJ did what Tiller, Tako and every good digger does: he looked in places other people ignored. Spending months in Brazilian record shops, Gómez passed on expensive Tropicália and Música popular brasileira (MPB) grails, eventually discovering alien, beautiful music from cult figures like Priscilla Ermel and Fernando Falcão. About a year after reviewing the compilation, someone put Outro Tempo on at a Portland shop where I was digging. It took me a while to place it, but what immediately struck me about tracks like Piry Reis's zonked, lounge jazz track "O Sol Na Janela," is that it doesn't sound like anything else. How many reissues feel like a portal to an alternate sonic universe?
  
  - Matt McDermott
- 2017
  Pauline Anna Strom
  Trans-Millenia Music
  Rvng Intl.
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- I was in Commend, RVNG Intl.'s Lower East Side storefront and community space, when founder Matt Werth got a call from Pauline Anna Strom. She gave Werth the OK for RVNG to reissue her works, or at least that's what my memory leads me to believe given the excitement with which Werth then told me about Strom and the project: her New Age '70s roots (which she later abandoned as it devolved into "bullshit propaganda"); her minimally issued, difficult-to-locate records with bootleg rereleases; and her lifelong blindness and aversion to braille. It's that enthusiastic sharing that makes each RVNG (and, in this case, ReRVNG, the label's dedicated reissue series) release feel special, intentional and intimate: Hey, I've got this incredible record, and I can't wait for you to hear it. I really hope you like it.
  
  Released in 2017, Trans-Millenia Music collects six of Strom's seven albums, sequencing the tracks without regard to chronological order. This is fitting for Strom's music, which feels steeped in the past and future while also rejecting being pinned down to any era at all. That's on purpose—the title of her first LP, Trans-Millenia Consort, means "crossing-time companion." Through shimmering arpeggios, lush field-recordings and samples, and otherworldly synths that deserve more than the "cosmic" descriptor, Strom's soundscapes transcend the San Francisco New Age scene that inspired her to buy her first electric organ. Trans-Millenia Music was far from RVNG's first careful reissue and there were more still to come before the '10s were out (sub-label Freedom To Spend's 2019 reissue of Ernest Hood's Neighborhoods was also notably warm and poignant), but the meeting of RVNG's loving sharing and Pauline Anna Strom's timeless, healing compositions was a moment to treasure.
  
  - Marissa Cetin
- 2017
  Photek
  T'Raenon (Version)
  ART Records
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Techno and drum & bass traditionally travel on different orbits, but every once in a while, the stars align. The '10s saw sustained communication between the two worlds, with drum & bass producers turning to techno and vice versa. The '90s and '00s had their own spikes in cross pollination, but Photek's T'Raenon EP from 1996, which saw the foundational drum & bass producer dabble with techno for the first time, was arguably the most conspicuous crossover.
  
  The 2017 reissue reminded us of its prescience, which paradoxically contrasts with the record's retrofuturistic tendencies. "T'Raenon (Version)"'s weightless atmosphere and softly syncopated percussion emphasises jazzy fluidity over techno stomp, a suggestive and immersive combination developed in the '10s by artists like the SUED crew and Actress. But at the time, Parkes was channelling the so-called intelligent UK techno sound of the early '90s—itself a development of Detroit's techno innovations—which experienced a resurgence in the late '10s with the critical reappraisal of acts like B12 and Stasis. Appropriate then that T'Raenon was originally released on Kirk Degiorgio's Op-ART label—his own early techno work under the As One alias was also drawing new listeners before T'Raenon's re-release.
  
  This made the reissue's timing doubly effective. In one fell swoop, it highlighted how intergenerational and cross-genre flows of influence often first look backwards to point forward. But even as house and techno audiences' interest in jungle and drum & bass reached new heights, the enduring disconnect between those scenes remained despite their tradition of cross pollination: T'Raenon was surely the pick of the Parkes reissues of the decade for house and techno fans, though drum & bass heads could argue the greater significance of Basement Records' collection of Parkes' work as The Sentinel and The Truper, a flawless compilation that's essential listening for any budding drum & bass student.
  
  - Mark Smith
- 2017
  The Other People Place
  Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café
  Warp Records
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- In the early-to-mid '90s, there was no match for the absolutely Promethean volume of creative horsepower coming out of Detroit, much less from the electro-techno outfit known as Drexciya. A seemingly phantom crew later revealed as the work of two men named Gerald Donald and James Stinson, the pair looked past the Motor City music scene's already heady fixation with Afrofuturist outer space and instead pursued a sound that scanned more submarine. Theirs was techno linked in both name and sound to the mythos of a "Black Atlantis," an intricate sci-fi narrative that starts with the descendants of pregnant African women cast overboard during the Middle Passage. After more than a decade building this universe, Stinson swam to the surface and ended up in a Starbucks.
  
  Lifestyles Of The Laptop Café, Stinson's tender and incognito solo release as The Other People Place, was initially met with a mixed response, probably in part due to its anonymity, and, in the eyes of some critics, because it "lack[ed] originality." The calm 808 patterning is more or less uninterrupted across the entire album, and yes, if any tracks feature vocals, the songs are comprised of the same eight or so words throughout. But there is something else present within the album—a smoke of yearning, a wisp of romantic desperation—that reliably skewers the heart.
  
  It's easy to understand why contemporary audiences find kinship in its despondency. A fan instigated a polite petition for Warp's repressing in 2017, and to everybody's surprise, the label responded within two months. Legions now reclaim the part-prayer-part-warning in "Let Me Be Me," the lump-in-throat pangs of "You Said You Want Me," the horny groans in "Eye Contact." All of it seems so prescient, so pining, so lost. The greatest loss, of course, is that Stinson passed a year to the day of the album's release, at the hand of the very conflict at its center: "complications of the heart."
  
  - Mina Tavakoli
- 2018
  Midori Takada
  Through The Looking Glass
  Palto Flats
  
  Listen: Bandcamp / Soundcloud
- The cover art for Midori Takada's 1983 release is not a lost work by Henri Rousseau, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a rare and freaky outlier from the French artist. The colors are creamy and subdued, the flora is ferny, big and breezy, but at the center lives a plump rabbit the size of a horse. It is, like the first of four tracks within the album, an accurate recreation of what one would imagine "Mr. Henri Rousseau's Dream" might feel like, if one could live inside his oil paintings. There would be an ocarina, bird calls, the blocky patter of an expertly dinged marimba, a Coca-Cola bottle played like a flute, rustlings of fauna—a general sensibility for the serene, the threatening, the natural and a squeeze of the surreal.
  
  Released in 1983 by RCA Japan and reissued by Palto Flats and WRWTFWW Records in 2017 to the collective huzzah of thousands on Discogs (it was the second best-selling album on the site that year), Through The Looking Glass was a distinctly personal breed of minimalism. It feels influenced by the numinous tinklings of Riley, Reich and Glass, as well as the damp, Fourth World imaginations of Jon Hassell, studies of traditional African polyrhythms via the Ghanaian gyil xylophone, and the ancient pluckings of the Korean gayageum zither (Takeda worked under masters of the latter two).
  
  Like Yoko Ochida, the artist actually responsible for the cover, Takada is a quiet virtuoso worthy of canonization. Her lysergic entry into the minimal and ambient universes—prefiguring contemporary labels like Mood Hut or FATi Records—perfected a form and tilted it to abstraction. She is a master, in other words.
  
  - Mina Tavakoli
- 2018
  Christoph De Babalon
  If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It
  Cross Fade Enter Tainment
  
  Listen: Apple Music / Spotify
- Much of the 2010s was defined by an archaeological impulse, as third-generation ravers picked over the rubble of the '90s impact zone in search of ideas worth salvaging. Many reissues served only to remind us that the original energy of jungle and drum & bass wasn't easily reproduced—a point underlined by the German producer Christoph De Babalon, whose reissue of his own 1997 debut album came off like a professor calling order in the classroom. Opening with 15 minutes of bleached-out drones, If You're Into It I'm Out Of It was, at the time, a fitting soundtrack for the bedroom paranoia that followed rave's giddy euphoria. 20 years later, the record has a premonitory aura: a dread fusion of drum & bass, noise and spooky ambience that could be the raw material for any number of 2010s releases on labels like Blackest Ever Black and Modern Love.
  
  From the frozen tundra of the opening "Opium," De Babalon carves out a bleak vision of the present and future. The sci-fi dreams of Detroit's electronic visionaries have been shattered, leaving us to scrape an existence in the toxic wreckage. There's a relentless early run of heavyweight rave tracks ("Nostep," "Expressure," "What You Call A Life"), where kamikaze breakbeats explode on impact and ghostly whispers drift between blown-out snares—and those are the fun ones. He follows up by falling into a four-minute K-hole on "Water," crashing through dimensions while pondering unanswerable questions like, "What if breakcore, but nuclear?" No wonder the record found a home on Alec Empire's Digital Hardcore, a label envisioned as a manifesto for the political sharp-end of techno, punk and industrial. Even in that radical milieu, If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It sticks out as being hopelessly introverted: the depressive ruminations of a self-described "insecure and neurotic bedroom producer." Precious little new music of the 2010s could match its intensity.
  
  - Chal Ravens