What Is The Best Reissue Label?

and they've done, what, one or two reissues? c'mon, be serious.

anyway: repertoire, anopheles, witch and warlock, gear fab, world psychedelia, acid symposium, shadoks, and the label whose name i'm not sure of but they reissued gary higgins, american blues exchange, morly grey, magi and the magic mixture (flash? flash back?). bootleggers/'grey area': radioactive, akarma, black rose.

i don't know if they've done anything other than furekaaben and the first jan dukes de grey album, but wounded nurse out of korea were good for a couple of months.

we aren't allowed to buy their stuff. didn't you get the memo?

xpost i was gonna

we aren't allowed to buy their stuff.

eh. had a fun time trying to explain to non-psych buyers that much of the time you either buy a bootleg or "grey area repro" or go without. anyone think it's a coincidence that radioactive have suddenly stopped doing reissues and a label called "fallout" mysteriously appeared a few days later?

For smaller/ newer ones, Dust To Digital wins this for me, though Mississippi Records is shaping up to be really awesome and CaseQuarter is of course excellent. Honest Jon's rules, well the things I have by them do anyway. And Fire in the Attic is just about to reissue that Karen Dalton record -- about time! Revenant comes to mind though of course they never were exclusively "reissue."

Soul Jazz has a lot of really excellent releases but their approach seems formulaic and at time uninspired. Their "Gospel Soul" comp for instance was a real missed opportunity -- there are hundreds of better tunes thatn those that wound up on that thing.

"The Christ Tree" A day in Hell?

Ohh and fuck if Cortical Foundation didn't have (they still around?) a near-perfect run there...

sheesh, i didn't know, that's why i asked.

yetiguy - i can't speak on everything on anopheles, but you should also check out the todd tamanend clark nova psychedelia 2cd - basement progtronic space rock weirdness from the 70s and 80s.

mainly Factory, Crepuscule, and Sarah. with a few other labels thrown in for good measure

LTM's liner notes are pretty well-done.

Hey Mike. The Todd Tamanend Clark set is something else. The Homestead and Wolfe album is really good too.

but how much of TOTE is reissue and how much not?

one more that hasn't: norton.

label that has a great catalog but treats it like shit: collectables.

and finally, i gotta join the chorus: soul jazz appears to be going about it wrong. its like theyre repackaging old soul sounds for the benefit of younger audiences who got into the music through hip-hop, but think everything has to be relating to funk or leading up to funk in some way, so the context is off. that SOUL GOSPEL series looks like a total botch-up: they basically took any random soul record with a blatant gospel influence (or the other way around), with no regard for where this music fit in. numero group, on the other hand, just put out a funk gospel comp that consisted entirely of actual gospel acts getting funky...which is what s.j. shoulda done, instead of taking well-circulated tracks by aretha and others.

LTM and Renascent both focus on a period near and dear to my heart. Cherry Red as well, they own almost everything, and their Seeds compilations (the punk/post-punk/synth-wave/art-punk/whatever version of Nuggets) is what pretty much started me on the late 70s early 80s UK 7" collecting tip.

Hyped2Death has been the most overwhelming and useful series of releases though.

and thanks for the Acute props. Ike Yard CD came out on tuesday.

x-post bear family story: my ex-wife and i spent a day interviewing and hanging out with charlie louvin (who kept his overt racism in check since he could tell she was part indian). at the louvin bros. museum in bell buckle tennessee -- a large one-room shack crammed with photos of his brother ira's mangled death car on the wall and some records and sovenirs -- i eyed the bear family louvins box set. "if you buy that $140 6 CD box set from germany there, i'll get a quarter in royalties from it!" he said.

...which reminds me of far more affordable reissue labels like document that certainly provide an awesome service (sometimes being the most thorough source for any number of artists & genres -- say, early vocal quartets or preacher/ congregation recordings), but you just wish they'd clean up the sound a teensy bit. (just because some people took too heavy a hand with noise reduction techniques in the '80s and '90s is no reason to be so archivally minded as to never employ the stuff.)

...not to mention the whole thorny issue of re-releasing music exclusively from an era where you need never pay any royalties to artists. i understand strachwitz would always at least attempt to pay royalties to the families of musicians, even when their works were well out of copyright.

pressure sounds >> soul jazz. (for reggae)

also more kudos for acute (i wish you'd release more records dan) and for ltm (they really opened my eyes to the greatness of non JD/NO/ACR factory stuff and extensive liner notes).

Other than that the others I like have all been mentioned - Soul Jazz, Rhino, etc.

seriously, we're working on it.

Ooh, seconded. I'm quite looking forward to the B-Music comp and the Valerie and Her Week of Wonders soundtrack.

And they've actually gotten better over the years (they couldn't get much worse)! Of course, that owes to the fact that other companies (Rhino etc.) make the product for Collectibles to market. (same w/Collector's Choice).

but, anyway, yeah, collector's choice stuff is sounding fine now. even if the stuff they choose to put out is sometimes less than memorable. that elektra singles thing was kinda cool. sounded good anyway.

I think on Rhino but I'd have to dig to find out... all I know is I got Psychedelic Sounds for £5 and it's one of the best purchases I ever made.

cd-r bootlegs even. mp3/rapidshare blogs make creel pone seem a bit pointless or antiquated

http://cherryred.co.uk/lemon/artists.htm

Aldo Nova reissue, Faster Pussycat remixes, Night Ranger and Bango Tango reissues, who knows, maybe these sales are making Joe Meek possible. Seems like a good plan to keep them all separate but feeding the mothership.