Labels

Germany’s DJ Koze makes the type of sweeping, kaleidoscopic electronic that sheds easy genre definitions or quick reference points. When he released his 2013 masterpiece Amyglda, some positioned it next to Daft Punk’s album from that year, Random Access Memories, as the go-to electronic release of that year. Coming from a hip-hop background, I detected the influence of Madlib in Koze’s whimsical, slightly stoned collages, and that sense of playfulness and culture spelunking extends to the artists on Koze’s Pampa label. Philip has captured the “pleasure of small surprises” that is essential to label’s charm. It’s an amazing, frequently silly and always surprising collection.

As one of the stalwart holdovers from the early ‘90s indie boom, Drag City has released consistently lovable and knotty music for over two decades. While other labels of their kind built their names on too-cool-for-school slackerdom, Drag City have always been overachievers, putting out music that consistently redefines whatever genre or idiom they are working within. It’s country music that rejects tradition, punk music with a sense of dignity, and avant-experimentalism that feels more like hanging out with your buds than begrudgingly doing your homework. Above all, Drag City are the torchbearers for the concept that challenging, willfully elusive art should always remember to keep it fun, and this playlist is our token of gratitude for all the great sounds they’ve shared with us over the years.Note: The Drag City catalog is not available on streaming services, but can and should be purchased on iTunes, Amazon, or, better yet, your favorite record store.

Growing up in the South during the 90s, Factory Records was always the music of older cousins and cooler friends. Dont get me wrong, I have had hard musical crushes on acts like Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, Joy Division, and New Order, but it never seemed entirely mine either. It was the soundtrack for lives that I made guest appearances in, humming in the background as a bit of anglophile ennui.This playlist is from Spotify user Coco Baker. (S)he isnt a professional curator (as far as I know), and the playlist does have some factual slights (that Cabaret Voltaire track was released on Rough Trade and not Factory Records), but its still a pretty good overview of the scene. Too often, user generated playlist have no sense of rhythm. People will line up multiple tracks by the same artists, and there will be giant stylistic leaps from track to track, but this does seem to have a perspective and flow, so well excuse the factual lapses.

Delicious Vinyl put out legendary hip-hop titles between 1989 and 1995, and the Los Angeles-based classic label’s catalog of West Coast party rock and conscious rap still gets play, on radio and at functions worldwide.

Their iconic catalog includes smash hits “Wild Thing” (on Tone-Lōc’s Lōc-ed After Dark) and “Bust a Move” (on Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’), as well as groundbreaking albums by Masta Ace Incorporated, which married West Coast and East Coast sensibilities, and the sensational second album from Pharcyde, Labcabincalifornia, which was responsible for launching the career of producer extraordinaire J Dilla, who contributed to six songs including the immortal “Runnin’.”All this music connects the dots between the early Def Jam sound, hip-hop’s migration to the west coast, and micro-eras of sample-based production. You’ll find sounds analogous to Rick Rubin’s booming, stark production for Run-DMC; the Beastie Boys’ record-store-in-a-blender album Paul’s Boutique; and a smoothed-out, funky angle similar to groups like Hieroglyphics.

With Craft Recordings re-releasing key Delicious Vinyl albums in summer 2018, a bunch of that music is now back in circulation, waiting for your trip down memory lane or maybe first-time listening experience.

Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock, but has since morphed into so many different forms that it is more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix or Ty Segall, the dreamy reveries of Spiritualized and Tame Impala, or the heady, head-nodding beats of Flying Lotus and J Dilla, psychedelica is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering. Heres our curated guide to the best head music to help you chase the rush, including our genre-spanning psych playlist (at right) and links to past Dowsers mixes for even deeper trips.

INDIE PSYCHPsychedelia never dies, it just keeps getting weirder. Animal Collective threw down the gauntlet with 2004’s Sung Tongs, their childlike, free-spirited update of psych rock, and a generation of indie artists have taken up the challenge. From Deerhunters fearsome ambient punk to Zombys scrambled dubstep to Ariel Pinks wounded daydreams, the youngest generation continues to push music inward.Recommended Listening:Animal Collective’s Outer LimitsDreamy Noise Sounds: The Best of Kranky RecordsNew Tropics: The Modern Los Angeles Underground

PSYCH PUNKThe common myth about punk is that it formed in opposition to bloated 70s rock, and rejected Pink Floyd and anything associated with psychedelia. But the truth is that plenty of punks, such as restless hardcore purveyors Black Flag and volatile noiseniks the Butthole Surfers, not to mention punk-adjacent acts like the Jesus & Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr., looked back to the ‘60s when deciding how to expand their sound and beguile their fans.Recommended Listening:When Punk Got WeirdPsychedelia in the ‘80sThe 50 Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time

PSYCH FOLKIn the beginning, psychedelic music was associated with guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix and waves of feedback. But that big bang was soon followed by generations of artists—from 60s Greenwich Village folkie Karen Dalton to Bert Jansch and his 70s British folk group Pentangle to modern dreamweavers like Devendra Banhart— who used acoustic guitars, pared-down arrangements, and dexterously plucked melodies to pull the listener into their headspace without the need for amplification.Recommended Listening:Way Past Pleasant: A Guide to Psychedelic FolkReligion, Rock, and LSD: A Brief History of Jesus Freaks

PSYCH ROCKWhen rock first got psychedelic in the 60s, the most obvious proponents were self-professed freaks like Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. But nearly everywhere you looked, you could find someone trying to access their inner mind via some radical noise, from cult acts like Love and The Fugs to icons like The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Since then, every generation since has found their own way to look inside, from the Dream Syndicate in the ’80s, to Slowdive in the ’90s, to My Morning Jacket in the 21st century.Recommended Listening:Bad Trips: The Dark Side of the ‘60sSpace Rock: A Cosmic JourneyHow Psychedelia Reclaimed Modern Rock

PSYCH JAZZAt its mid-’60s moment of origin, psychedelia immediately found a natural host in jazz. After all, both are concerned with evoking a feeling and a mood, and following inspiration wherever it leads—from the spiritually searching compositions of Alice Coltrane to Mulatu Astatke’ slippery Latin-flavored explorations to Flying Lotus dedication to feeding brains with jazz-damaged trance whispers.Recommended Listening:The Black Experimental Music MixtapeChampions of Ethiopian GrooveThe Best of Brainfeeder

PSYCH FUNKPsychedelic music has traditionally been used as a way to explore the inner workings of your mind. But if you take off the headphones, its also a great way to explore your body on the dance floor. Soul, funk and R&B have a long tradition of making music that rocks the hips and the third eye at the same time, from Eddie Hazels righteous riffing on Funkadelic’s Cosmic Slop to Dâm-Funks alien synth-funk bangers.Recommended Listening:A Deeper Shade of Psych SoulThe Afrofuturist Impulse in MusicInto the Nite: Synth-Funk Fantasias

PSYCH RAPPsychedelic music has drifted into every form of music, and since any worthwhile hip-hop producer keeps their ears open, its only natural that it’s became part of the mix. Revered producers J Dilla and Madlib have made hip-hop tracks that oozed with so much mood and shimmer that they didnt even need MCs to rewire the listeners brain, while the genre’s heady offshoot, trip-hop, has been obliterating genre lines and listeners’ minds for more than two decades.Recommended Listening:Great (Post-Donuts) Instrumental Hip-Hop TracksBehind the Beats: Madlib and DillaBest Trip-Hop Tracks

PSYCH-TRONICAWhy settle for rocking minds and rocking bodies when you can do both at once? From the Chemical Brothers to Neon Indian to Boards of Canada, many of the most cutting-edge electronic-music producers spend equal amounts of time focussing on booming beats as well as keyboard lines, sine moans, and digital gurgles designed to tickle the mind. And if you need to rest after a night out, theres plenty of trippy ambient chillout tracks for that as well.Recommended Listening:Essential Acid House TraxThe Art of Psychedelic Disco-RockThe Best Electronic Shoegaze

Its not entirely surprising that the British artist Powell once sampled Big Blacks Steve Albini; the Chicago noise-rockers volume and in-your-face attitude go to the heart of what Powell does in his own music and with his label, Diagonal Records. Co-founded with fellow Brit Jaime Williams in 2011, Diagonal pulls together an unlikely mix of sounds: the lurching rhythms of rockabilly, the clang of post-punk, and the eviscerating feedback of the contemporary noise scene, all of which get hammered into a lumpy approximation of techno. (Youll also find Hall and Oates samples, Autechre remixes, and reissues of early avant-rappers Death Comet Crew in the mix; Diagonals vectors are nothing if not far-reaching.) The overall effect is a little like gargling broken glass with a manic grin on your face.

On April 10 of this year, Ben McOsker announced that Load Records—after nearly a quarter-century of contorting brains—is closing up shop. To describe the underground rock and noise label’s run as stellar is a gross understatement. Few imprints that document the fringes of sound have released even half the amount of genre-defining albums that McOsker and his partner in crime Laura Mullen have: Lightning Bolt’s Ride the Skies, Sightings’ Absolutes, The USA IS A Monster’s Tasheyana Compost, Yellow Swans’ At All Ends—the list goes on. These aren’t just amazing records, they’re seeds that filtered out into the world and helped spawn a global noise movement that came to a screeching climax in the ’00s. To put Load’s legacy in its proper context, you’d have to reach back to the glory years of Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile for an apt comparison—though, truth be told, neither label ever ventured as far out sonically as Load.Founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, Load served as the primary outlet for the unique mix of local greaser punks and art-school transplants inhabiting the city’s sprawling underground. Lightning Bolt are the most popular of the Providence outfits, but Load also released critical titles from Olneyville Sound System, Thee Hydrogen Terrors, Pleasurehorse, Kites, Prurient, and The Human Beast. McOsker and Mullen also looked far beyond the city’s limits: By the mid-’00s, they were unleashing music from artists as far flung as New York City (Sightings, Excepter, The USA IS A Monster), Ohio (Sword Heaven, Homostupids), San Francisco (Total Shutdown, The Hospitals), and Norway (Noxagt, Ultralyd).Beyond its consistently excellent output, Load pushed the limits of what an independent record label could get away with while continuing to remain commercially viable. Most imprints—however freaky, cacophonous, and anarchic—that get a taste of success tend to begin playing it safe, opting to release records that rarely venture beyond what’s already proven to be popular. But, possessing a deep love for trickster spirit-like unpredictability, Load actually got stranger the more units it sold. How else do you explain the existence of the Hawd Gankstuh Rappuhs MCs (Wid Ghatz)’s Wake Up and Smell the Piss, a descent into perverted, excrement-obsessed, lo-fi noise-hop that probably sold no more than a dozen copies? This record even confused Load’s most hardcore fans.But by unleashing such wildly uncommercial music alongside proven sellers like Lightning Bolt, Load helped give a much larger platform to genius musicians who are way too left field and individualistic for even the indie rock marketplace. For that, Load deserves some kind of cultural service award. Thank you, Ben and Laura!Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Drake OvO Sound may effectively be a vanity imprint for its biggest star, but there’s something to admire in their stylistic consistency and aesthetic continuity. It speaks to Drake’s overall impact on culture, and also the partnership that Drake has formed with his core set of producers (40 and Boi-1da). There’s a clear through-line from the sound those developed on solo Drake releases and the sonic nooks that PARTYNEXTDOOR or dvsn are currently exploring. This playlist, curated by Drake, features some of the labels best tracks. Though the music is at times vibrant and it’s well worth a listen, this at times feels like a boilerplate marketing/PR playlist, and the inclusion of Drake on at least 2/3rds of the tracks feels slightly distasteful.

Like so many great record companies, Greensleeves was a record shop before it was a label. Founded in the London neighborhood of Shepherd’s Bush by former accountant Chris Cracknell and a DJ from Norfolk named Chris Sedgwick, the shop spent two years building up a reputation as the place to find the tastiest island imports. Then in 1977, its owners made the shift to producing music in the UK themselves. The Greensleeves label made its debut with a 7-inch by Dr. Alimantado, a singer and toaster who was already finding favor with the city’s safety-pinned tastemakers thanks to DJ Don Letts and his punk-reggae parties at The Roxy. The arrival of Alimantado’s album The Best Dressed Chicken in Town—a high watermark for producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and for reggae in general—established Greensleeves as the real deal.Of the British labels that were instrumental in building a global audience for Jamaican music, Island and Trojan arguably retain greater name-brand cachet, partially because they arrived on the scene earlier than Cracknell and Sedgwick did. But Greensleeves may be the most influential due to the sheer gravity and diversity of its releases, as well as its ability to spread the hottest trends far and wide. Even before the label began, the store had a predilection for emergent sounds that had yet to enter the mainstream, its clientele largely turning up their noses at Bob Marley’s big sellers in favor of Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown. Greensleeves’ quest for freshness would reap the greatest dividends when Cracknell and Sedgwick made a fortuitous alliance with Henry “Junjo” Lawes, the producer and label owner who became the standard-bearer for dancehall in the 1980s. The ensuing cavalcade of new stars—Eek-A-Mouse, Barrington Levy, Yellowman, Beenie Man, Ninjaman—would all become part of the Greensleeves story.Whereas the rock audiences that Island cultivated with Marley were wary of Jamaica’s increasingly electronic sounds, Greensleeves devotees developed an insatiable appetite for the new riddims that arrived in the wake of landmark releases like Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” in 1986, Shaggy’s “Oh Carolina” in 1993, and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” in 2003. Another spin on producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s ubiquitous Diwali riddim—which yielded hits for Wonder, Elephant Man, and Bounty Killer too—Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” was another monster hit for the label.Acquired by New York’s VP Records in 2008 but still prominent and prolific, Greensleeves hits the big 40 this summer, celebrating with anniversary concerts in Paris, New York, and London. Given that their back catalog contains over 500 albums (with an impressively high ratio of winners), any salute to Greensleeves is bound to be a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of gesture. But surely a taste of riddim is better than no riddim at all.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

If you’re into art-scarred, synth-driven, post-industrial music made in Brooklyn, you’re probably a fan of the Sacred Bones label. From the assaultive noise of Pharmakon to the jerky, tattered nihilism of Jenny Hval, they’ve formed an aesthetic that captures a certain post-Trump anxiety. It’s the sort of music that you want when shit goes down, and, via their Facebook page, Sacred Bones release a playlist of music they listen to when their own shit goes down. It’s mood-board music that oscillates between the sad neu-antiquity of Karen Dalton, the kitschy gothic folk of Current 93, and a genocidal dirge from Big Star. Play after the funeral (or the apocalypse).