Records that need to be reissued

[Phil_A]

Be nice if the Microdisney and Fatima Mansions stuff could be reissued. Especially Lost In The Former West.

Cherry Red have reissued the Rough Trade era Microdisney stuff in recent years, although they must be in fairly limited pressings as they tend to go OOP again fairly quickly. The Virgin albums are a whole other kettle of fish, as the likelihood of getting the rights back off whichever multimedia conglomerate currently owns that portion of the Branson empire seems slim at best.

The saga of The Fatima Mansions back catalogue is an even sadder affair - they ended up signing away all the rights just to keep the band on the road when things got tight financially, which completely fucked them over in the long term. Cathal also reckons the masters may have been destroyed in the 2008 Universal backlot fire, which would just be the icing on the tragedy cake really.

[Sebastian Cobb]

De La Soul released all their old sample-heavy albums for free a few years back, all that was exchanged was an email address so the band could contact their fan-base. Mp3 only, but many people grabbed them, so it shouldn't be too hard to find them now.
Maybe if you look around on places like SoulSeek you might even find decent vinyl rips.

I've had mp3's of it from soulseek for nearly 20 years. That's not the point if it's not on streaming platforms to many ot might as well not exist. People are locked in to these places now.


Soulseek appears a shadow of its former self nowadays, the idm and dnb rooms used to have over a thousand of users between them, it's about an order of magnitude less now

[NoSleep]

Soulseek has never been better; you'll find stuff unavailable anywhere else (I found decent vinyl>flac rips of all The Box stuff I mentioned earlier). I just use it to download stuff and occasionally chat one to one with people who I take stuff from or are downloading from me. The rooms have never been a thing in all the time I've used it (over 15 years).

[Sebastian Cobb]

I expanded my collection and knowledge of music loads by hanging around and chatting in the IDM/Oldskool/DnB/UK HipHop rooms, for me they were a massive part of it and the reason I stayed when torrent sites and filelockers (which were often posted straight into soulseek chat so people could grab them straight away without dealing with queues or etiquette) made getting files much easier than p2p.

Lots of us didn't even have shares at one point. I used to go in and chat on my netbook with my files on a different machine a lot of the time.

[NoSleep]

Soulseek is generally better than torrenting now, thanks to broadband. And the variety and rarity has always been tops.

[Better Midlands]

3ft High & Rising

Maybe if you look around on places like SoulSeek you might even find decent vinyl rips.

At 67.24 I always thought they over stretched it for a single album, sounded good on cassette as I remember. A nice double album release would have been perfect for this.

[NoSleep]

Good call about cassette versions of that-era hiphop. I would tend to get the cassette release over the vinyl for stuff like Ultramagnetics 2nd album that was crammed on one LP.

I know Public Enemy used to take great care over the cassette releases of their albums, and its probably true of other artists.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Slightly later you'd get tapes/cd's having blended tracks/skits whereas the LP's were kept separate to help dj's.

You don't seem to get that with new vinyl releases I don't think.

[NoSleep]

When I master albums ready for vinyl I do it the other way around. Usually the LP sides are treated as a continuous entity and the tracks blended (masters sent as "side one" &
"side two"), whilst for CD/digital we separate the tracks completely so that people listening to their collections on shuffle get clean starts and endings. Vinyl DJs know well enough how to cope if they have any skill.

[Sebastian Cobb]

That's really down to a change in how a listener has changed their relationship with music since pmp's (including phones) can store your entire collection. Or in other words, a lot of people don't listen to albums in their entirety, like they used to.

[BlodwynPig]

Soulseek is generally better than torrenting now, thanks to broadband. And the variety and rarity has always been tops.

yes, and the fact you can save a Wishlist by keyword...I've had very rare 80s limited pressing bootleg cassettes pop up after years of waiting.

[thugler]

I have 3 feet high and rising on vinyl. Got it for 2 quid in a charity shop! Surprised to hear it's out of print.

Definitely going to have to have a go at soulseek, I'm a member of some big music trackers but noone downloads anything from me so I'm unable to get a decent ratio.

[phantom_power]

Soulseek is great. i don't use the rooms but you can search for stuff and there is so many bootlegs and rarities on there

As for early De La Soul I am sure I saw an interview not long ago where they said they were trying to sort the sample issues out and there was a chance they would be re-released at some point

[Sebastian Cobb]

The rooms were a godsend to begin with because the search worked in a janky peer-to-peer way and I think it scattergunned the rooms first, or if the rooms didn't work, it listed people by amount of files shared and you could go poking around then and people were decent and sorted their music collection in nice sane directory structures.

[NoSleep]

So that's why the rooms were important earlier on. All the time I've used SoulSeek the search function has worked adequately.

[SpiderChrist]

All of De La Soul's early stuff. It went out of print physically ages ago, it looks like it'll never be reissued or released digitally for sample clearance reasons.

https://www.okayplayer.com/music/breakdown-de-la-soul-fight-tommy-boy-records-3-feet-high-rising.html/amp

I think it's a real shame. HipHop seems slightly unusual that even young fans seem to look backwards at the history of it. These people won't have CD players and plenty of millenials/genx'rs don't feel a need to keep their discs now so that's no use. A landmark LP like that deserves to be preserved like something in a museum.

I was lucky enough to find a CD of Three Feet High in my local Oxfam about a year ago. 2 disc edition for 2.99. A rare treat - my original vinyl copy got nicked at a party and my CD copy succumbed to disc rot.

[buzby]

Years ago, someone made me a copy of It's Immaterial's wonderful Blue Nile-esque second album 'Song', but it got lost during a house move. Would love a proper reissue of that out there.

Similarly, I'd really like to see Black's early pre-Wonderful Life singles he recorded while signed to Eternal/Warners reissued. WEA collected them together into a 7-track mini-album as a cash-in when Wonderful Life became a hit, but they have never been released since.

[NattyDread 2]

At 67.24 I always thought they over stretched it for a single album, sounded good on cassette as I remember. A nice double album release would have been perfect for this.

Yep. I've been through a few (UK) copies of the original and every one is far too quiet.
It was in fact repressed onto a double lp which presumably sounds much better. Probably goes for a few bob though.
'Stakes is High' is a double and sounds fine as does my bootleg of 'Is Dead' Pretty sure 'Buhloonie Mindstate' is on the quiet side too and that's a single.

[sutin]

I've been using Soulseek for about 15 years, and in all that time i've never understood why it has chatrooms.

[holyzombiejesus]

Wish they'd reissue some of Jonathan Richman's earlier solo albums. There's a first appearance on vinyl for I, Jonathan in a few weeks which I'm really pleased about. Would like a decent pressing of Having a Party with... as the Greek pressing I spent loads of money on is practically a flexi.

[M-CORP]

If there's one album or artist whose lack of a digital or wider rerelease irritates me, it usually tends to be ex-Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos' work under the Electric Music banner. The 1993 album Esperanto isn't too hard to come by, but the self-titled Beatles parody, on the other hand, is. It isn't as bad as some on the Net have said, by the way, I've always liked 'The Young Urban Professional' and 'Shallow Grave'.

[His Name Is Death]

I love Type O Negative, but goddamn the guitars sound like shit. I don't know what the technical term for it is. An obnoxious, wince-inducing amount of 'fuzz'?

Don't know what they can do about it now. It's a real shame because if they'd had the production values of bands like MBV, Hum and Failure that would have improved the overall dark and doomy effect they were going for. But I appear to be in the minority for this, so whatever, I guess.

[SteveDave]

The best record Frank Zappa every had anything to do with.

My wishes have been answered...https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/gto-s/permanent-damage

And it's released on my birthday!