Sixty more albums with genuinely small followings, this time from 1950 through 1989. Same filter as Volume 1: nothing the reissue circuit has already dragged into the canon, so no Rodriguez story arcs, no Numero-headliner rediscoveries, no acid-archive staples. Private-press loners, deep soul one-shots, loft jazz, second-shelf krautrock, outsider country, and the 80s lanes Volume 1 didn't touch. FILE UNDER cards point at your shelves.
The album barely existed as an artform yet, which is exactly why full LPs from this decade's margins are so strange: nobody was watching.
The group that invented the ache of doo-wop, collected on an early 10-inch when almost no Black vocal groups got albums at all. Sonny Til's lead is the sound of longing before rock and roll gave it a beat.
A voice that could level a building, singing jump blues and torch material for a label that never promoted her right. She cut "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" before Jerry Lee Lewis and got none of the money.
Gospel-trained vocal group fronted by Lowman Pauling, whose stinging, overdriven guitar breaks predate everything: Steve Cropper and James Brown both took open notes. The cult around this band is small and evangelical.
The hiccuping ghost of rockabilly: stuttered, feral vocal takes too weird for hits and too perfect to forget. He spent decades claiming he invented the Sun sound; listen and it's genuinely hard to argue.
The first LP from the man who stabbed his speaker cone with a pencil and invented the power chord as menace. "Rumble" got banned from radio as an instrumental, still the highest compliment ever paid a guitar tone.
The pompadoured wildman Little Richard openly credited as his model, shrieking over pounded piano with zero commercial instinct. Capitol signed him, panicked, and let the album die; the cult keeps it alive by hand.
A one-man-band hobo who played harmonica out of the side of his mouth while singing, recorded by Sam Phillips before Elvis ever walked in. Greil Marcus gave him a Mystery Train chapter; the listening public never followed.
Archie Brownlee's scream is the most terrifying sound in gospel, a shriek that secular soul spent twenty years domesticating. Hard gospel's violence, undiluted.
Under the paisley surface: regional garage casualties, free jazz off the canon's edge, and downhome blues cut live in rooms.
The Pacific Northwest's founding garage band, on their own label, rawer and stranger than their surf-era fame suggests. The Sonics learned at their feet; history filed it the other way around.
Sean Bonniwell dressed the band in black with one black glove each and wrote fuzz-punk miniatures with real arrangements underneath. One hit, then label sabotage and oblivion; the album is wall-to-wall sharp.
Minneapolis garage-psych whose title is a promise kept: "Action Woman" is the angriest 45 of its era, stretched here into an album of fuzz vengeance. Original pressings dissolved into the upper Midwest.
The Hollywood hustler-ghoul free-associating over sleazy acid rock, part put-on, part genuine breakdown, fully committed either way. Feels illegal to enjoy; hard to stop.
Mick Farren's Ladbroke Grove anarchists sold their debut by mail order through the underground press: blues-punk, tape collage, and sneering agitprop years before punk had a name for itself.
Sun-warped UK psych with dissonant guitar stabs and melodies that curdle mid-phrase; sold nothing, band dissolved into session work. Originals trade for house-deposit money while the actual cult stays tiny.
Heavy UK psych anchored by "Magic Potion," a proto-metal stomp everyone missed until collectors found it twenty years late. The album around it is moodier and better than its footnote reputation.
Cracked, keening free jazz from a multi-instrumentalist who vanished for four decades afterward, resurfacing in a park, still playing. With Milford Graves on drums it barely touches the ground.
Jazz guitar played as pure slide-and-scream texture, Linda Sharrock's wordless voice riding the feedback. The bridge between Coltrane's late fire and every noise guitarist you own.
Loft-era fire music with Arthur Doyle's tenor going fully vertical, recorded once and scattered across European labels. Among heads it gets discussed like a rumor that turned out to be true.
Discovered singing inside Angola prison, paroled, then recorded playing blues with no fixed meter or key, only testimony. The most harmonically free country blues ever cut, and none of it was an aesthetic choice.
One-man-band boogie: left-handed flipped guitar, rack harmonica, hi-hat and kick simultaneously, cut live in a room. Worked a Michigan assembly line by day, detonated juke joints by night.
A Black trans soul singer ruling Toronto's club circuit with a voice like silk over a switchblade, then vanishing completely in 1971. The material circulated for decades as pure collector legend.
Teenage garage at its most oceanic: minor-key drone originals self-pressed in runs of a few hundred, played on local radio once, gone. The purest small-cult object in this bin.
The honky-tonk demimonde that wrote hits for bigger names and drank the proceeds: Kemp's own sides are hard-shuffling, dead-eyed barroom country the mainstream sanded smooth. The real thing, before outlaw became a marketing category.
The private-press flood: loner folk pressed in hundreds, spiritual jazz on musician-owned labels, krautrock's second shelf, and dub cut for one soundsystem at a time.
A truck driver pressed his songwriting demos to shop to other artists; nobody bid, and the record became legend for its tuneless, wounded sincerity. Outsider music with zero self-awareness and total conviction.
Post-acid casualty turned Christian seeker singing hollowed-out guitar hymns about losing everyone he knew. One of the darkest loner-folk records ever pressed, in an edition of a few hundred.
Christian heavy psych with a vocalist doing full Jim Morrison possession over doomed fuzz. Pressed in a couple hundred copies for a church label that had no idea what it had.
Self-pressed Greenwich Village folk from a teenager writing about isolation with unnerving calm, unheard until crate archaeologists surfaced it decades later, and even then only barely.
Gruff Yorkshire guitar-poet with Mick Ronson on lead, making bruised, road-worn songs about endurance. Peel loved it; the public bought Cat Stevens instead. His cult stayed pub-sized for fifty years.
Indiana songwriter given one shot on a major with Nashville's best sessioneers, delivering gritty heartland spirituals, then dropped into total obscurity. Died fixing a car in 1993; the record barely circulates.
Swamp-deep Georgia baritone who started recording at 34, cut four albums of country-soul philosophy, and quit when nothing sold. The realest voice of the outlaw era belonged to a man the outlaw era never met.
Honky-tonk sung with a quaver that sounds like a man vibrating apart, which he was. Country radio couldn't handle the intensity; the cult around this record understands it's the genre's rawest hour.
The regional jazz underground: musician-pressed quartet records from Dallas, Detroit, and Cleveland that never left their cities. Buying lane, not single title: this shelf is where the real spiritual-jazz digging lives now.
Strata-East's least-discussed corner: vocal-led spiritual jazz that moves between chant, modal burn, and street-level prayer. The famous titles on the label got canonized; this one stayed in the crates.
Plunky Branch's pre-Oneness unit playing furious liberation jazz: percussion squalls, screaming tenor, political recitation. Fire music as community organizing.
A live double LP of ecstatic congregation-jazz recorded at an East Village church, chants and horns stacked into trance. James Mtume later went smooth; this is the volcano before.
Sun Ra's longtime bassist stepping out once: rolling, hymn-dark compositions anchored by his enormous arco tone. His only album as leader, and among ESP's most overlooked.
Anatolian protest folk run through fuzz pedals and electronics, sung by a woman the Turkish state repeatedly jailed for it. Ferocious, danceable, and genuinely dangerous to have made.
Krautrock's second shelf at its best: flute-led grooves that lock into Can-grade repetition without the name recognition. One album, then the members drifted into other German bands.
Percussion-heavy kraut-jazz from Kraftwerk's discarded early orbit (drummer included), all hand drums and modal sax and zero synthesizers. The road German music didn't take.
Chamber-kraut meditation: harp, oboe, tabla, and organ drifting through long devotional pieces. Peter Michael Hamel's collective made sacred music for no church in particular.
French underground collage-rock recorded for the Futura label and shelved when the money died: tape cuts, drones, and Dada rock fragments. Circulated for decades as a rumor among French-underground heads.
French poets making deliberately collapsing anti-rock: detuned guitars, mumbled verse, structures that rot in real time. Contemporary reviews called it unlistenable, which the cult takes as the point.
Japanese power trio fueled by exactly what the name says, playing lurching amphetamine blues-sludge with drummer Joey Smith howling about pills and eviction. Heavier than the era knew how to market.
Japan's darkest 60s band: funereal minor-key rock with Yoshio Hayakawa singing like a man reading his own obituary. Banned from broadcast for morbidity, worshipped quietly ever since.
Osaka commune folk-psych that mutated across handmade pressings: chanting, junk percussion, buzzing strings. The layer of the Japanese underground that never got the Rallizes rediscovery treatment.
Self-produced prophecy from a man who lived in a Kingston dump as a boy and pressed his own visions: the "Jesus Dread" whose mournful, doom-laden roots sound stands apart from the whole canon.
The Voice of Thunder intoning judgment over stripped, concrete-heavy rhythms. Chanting as architecture; On-U Sound and half of UK post-punk built on this foundation.
The most fragile great voice in roots reggae singing protest and heartbreak just before mental illness took him off the board. Beloved inside reggae circles, nearly unknown outside them.
Adrian Sherwood's first full dub-as-science-fiction statement, recorded at the decade's hinge: rhythms dismantled and rebuilt as deep space. The bridge between Kingston and every UK bass music you own.
Bahamian junkanoo-voodoo folk: ankle bells, whooping spirits, songs about zombies delivered with terrifying joy. A major label released it and had absolutely no idea what to do next.
Volume 1 owned the post-punk lane, so this bin takes the other exits: outsider synth, zolo art-pop, private-press new age, and desert noise.
A Kansas City eccentric's free-jazz-musique-concrète ritual pressed privately and passed hand to hand into the 80s cassette underground. Church organ, tape chaos, and total outsider conviction.
French cassette-culture surrealists making toy-synth nursery rhymes for a nightmare kindergarten. Mail-art pop that never wanted an audience bigger than its pen pals.
Hundreds of home-taped albums of warped power pop sold by mail subscription, decades before bedroom pop was a genre. Skip the two "known" comps and dig the raw club tapes; that's where the cult lives.
The new-age underground's founding transmission: shimmering electric textures made for meditation decades before ambient revivalists came digging. Take it straight or take it as drone; it holds either way.
Dutch cassette-label ambient of aching modesty: small synth melodies dissolving in tape fog, made by a recluse and dubbed in tiny runs. The gentlest music the 80s underground produced.
Fourth-world miniatures built from cheap keyboards and imagined ethnography, self-released by a Dutch 22-year-old. The Jon Hassell idea executed with pocket money and better dreams.
Franco-Iranian family collective making ethno-industrial trance from hand drums, chants, and murky electronics. The cassette underground's most transporting séance.
Arizona's underground eating itself: members of the Phoenix punk scene making dirge-surrealist death-rock in a one-off session. Desert weirdness with no scene to sell to and none sought.
Ex-Hampton Grease Band guitarist self-pressing instrumental albums of crying, ecstatic guitar that fusion was too polite to claim. Mailed from his house for decades; the cult remains letter-sized.
Valencian minimalist sailing Mediterranean myth on flutes, synth pulses, and spoken Catalan verse. A private world complete in itself, barely known even after the crate world found Spain.
Availability drops hard in this volume. The 50s sides and the jazz mostly stream; the private-press folk (Bixby, McGee, Higney), the French Futura records, the Japanese commune material, and nearly all of Bin D live on Discogs, YouTube rips, and specialist reissue shops. Budget accordingly and consider it sport.
Five doors by mood: Larry Jon Wilson if you want a voice tonight; Sonny Sharrock when the Sonic Youth itch turns to jazz; Yabby You for the dub theology; Jacks for the 1968 Joy Division mood; Gary Stewart when hard country needs to hurt.
Honest flags: two entries are lanes rather than single canonical albums (the regional-jazz private presses at C-09, the Osaka underground at C-22) because that territory genuinely works that way; and Selda, Iasos, and Exuma sit closest to the canonization line in this set. If the reissue machine gets to them, they age off the list. Everything else should stay buried a good while longer.