The obscurity files: brilliant records almost nobody has heard

A German actress recorded these home-tape folk songs between 1970 and 1973, put them in a drawer, and raised a family. Her son passed a CD to Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis decades later; Colour Green finally came out in 2006. The gold standard of the rescued album.

Converse wrote wry, aching songs in 1950s New York (a singer-songwriter before the term existed) then in 1974 packed her Volkswagen, mailed goodbye letters, and was never seen again. The recordings surfaced in 2009. Unbearably ahead of their time.

Orchestral desert folk-rock from 1969, full of highways, strangers and lights in the sky. In 1975 Sullivan drove into New Mexico and vanished, car found, no trace ever. U.F.O. plays like he wrote his own mystery first.

A Vietnam veteran's single 1969 album: weathered voice, acoustic guitar and exactly the calm, haunted realism the era's louder records missed. Original pressings number in the hundreds; the reissue made it a private-press grail.

The Detroit session player's only solo album (1975): whispered songs over open-tuned guitar, recorded in his attic, the "Om Album" to collectors. "Plain & Sane & Simple Melody" turns up in films now; the album around it is just as perfect.

The voice Dylan called his favourite in Greenwich Village, captured properly exactly once: In My Own Time (1971) sold nothing, Dalton never recorded again, and every reissue era since has re-crowned it. Billie Holiday by way of Oklahoma banjo.

A vanity-press synth-folk album by a mysterious Canadian who paid for everything in cash and disappeared, rediscovered in a Edmonton flea market and reissued in 2014, whereupon "Lewis" declined his own royalties when finally tracked down. The strangest, most weightless record in the collector canon.

Bristol's David Pearce recorded Further (1995) at home, all hissing tape and folk songs buried in distortion, "rural psychedelia," he called it. The lo-fi drone-folk blueprint, beloved by a few thousand people who are all evangelists.

Seattle's Jessamine made slow-burning space rock across the mid-90s for the Kranky label, organ drones, patient grooves, vocals like transmissions. The band other musicians name-check and almost nobody streams. Start with their 1994 self-titled album.

New Zealand's quietest export: Funke's hushed folk miniatures (Silk, 2018; Seance, 2021) are mastered so intimately you check whether she's in the room. The contemporary proof that the obscure-masterpiece tradition is alive and recording.