Crammed Discs is marking the "not-round figure" of turning 42 by reissuing a number of rare tracks from its archives.
The digital reissue series, totalling around 250 tracks, will explore the releases put out on the Belgian label’s sub-imprints SSR, Language and Selector, from the late ’80s through to the late ’90s. The three labels were outlets for mostly electronic music, as the first waves of Chicago house music and Detroit techno spread to Europe. Releases explored various forms of electronic music, from bleep techno and broken beat to downtempo and ambient, and much of the material had only been available on vinyl-only releases, or on now-deleted CDs.
The reissues will be rolled out by the label across the next 18 months, starting with the five-track sampler Rare SSR Electronica 1989-91 (Crammed Archives 0), which takes in EBM, bleep techno, early house music and more. Watch a vintage video for EP cut ‘Hallucination Generation’, by The Gruesome Twosome, above.
Offering more background on the reissues, Crammed Discs has summed up this period in the label’s history in a press release, which reads: "The story in a nutshell: as soon as the first wave of Detroit techno hit Europe, and playful, sample-based electronic dance music started emerging in the UK, we were excited by these new combinations of sounds, and started our SSR division in 1988.
"These early days of SSR saw the advent of a Belgian-Norwegian axis, when a handful of young Norwegian musicians and producers came to Brussels (in connection with Bel Canto, the electro pop band then signed to Crammed), and rubbed shoulders with central Crammed Discs figures such as Minimal Compact singer Samy Birnbach (later known as DJ Morpheus), label boss Marc Hollander, and Vincent Kenis (Marc’s former associate in Aksak Maboul). A series of hybrid electronic EPs were spawned, blending early techno stylings with flavours from around the world."
Crammed Discs will release Rare SSR Electronica 1989-91 (Crammed Archives 0) on May 27, 2022.
