The preservation of valuable cultural artifacts is rarely this funky.

Now-Again Records presents music from around the world – often rife with wonderfully ragged guitar tones and head-nodding drum grooves – much of which might otherwise have vanished into past decades and obscure music scenes.

“I try to find music that I think deserves a second chance,” says 33-year-old label founder Eothen “Egon” Alapatt. “It’s for the greater good. This music needs to be saved.”

Two prime examples are last year’s Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 – a collection of recordings by the Kashmere Stage Band – a high school jazz band from Houston that played astoundingly accomplished funk, soul and jazz and Back from the Brink: Pre-Revolution Psychedelic Rock from Iran: 1973-1979, which is an impressive 2-CD set compiling the work of Iranian guitarist, singer, songwriter and bandleader Kourosh Yaghmaei.

Last year, Now-Again also produced a globe-spanning compilation of funk, psychedelia and rock from Zambia, Brazil, Germany, Turkey and beyond titled Where Are You From? selected by former creative director Christophe Lemaire of Lacoste clothing and a three volume set dubbed True Soul: Deep Sounds from the Left of Stax.

And in 2010, the label released Those Shocking, Shaking Days, an aggressively researched compilation of Indonesian hard rock, psychedelia, prog and funk from 1970 to 1978.

All of the CDs are beautifully packaged with extensive notes, appreciations, mind-blowing color reproductions of album colors and promo shots of the artists, foldout cases – in some cases, with posters and DVDs documenting the making of the compilations.

Alapatt – who started the Los Angeles-based label in 2002 – began collecting records at the age of 12 and approaches each re-issue with a record-fan’s zeal for deeply obscure and hard-to-find music and an eye for vinyl-hound production qualities.

If there’s a thread linking the releases – other than that the records all having a strong whiff of funk – Alapatt says its “fringe music.” It might be that the recordings display a kind of freedom and global awareness of popular culture that emerged in places where such expressions weren’t necessarily smiled upon: the conformity-minded sphere of a public high school band room or the repressive settings of countries with conservative religious elements in times of political uncertainty like Iran or Indonesia.

The ways that black-derived, African-diasporic American popular music has influenced the world and vice versa is another unifying factor in the Now-Again catalog.

If the British Invasion was drawing inspiration from American blues, and then nodding toward India and Asia with drones, elements of raga and other far-flung influences, then the same thing was happening in other parts of the world. Only the process was inverted.

For instance, British and American music left a stamp on Yaghmaei’s Iranian rock, which veers from crooning to crushing. He was paying close attention to The Rolling Stones – he says as much in the liner notes – and you can hear it. But Yaghmaei didn’t need the sex or drugs to arrive at rock music with a Near-Eastern sound.

The route of influence was similar with the wide-ranging Indonesian bands on the Those Shocking, Shaking Days compilation. On the disc’s opening track “Haai,” the band Panbers announces its affinity for the Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Deeper in, some of the bands’ songs sound like Deep Purple outtakes; some – like The Brims – could pass for Can; others – like the amazing Ariesta Birawa Group – don’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard before. A few of these acts were superstars, like the heavy Duo Kribo, but many of these Indonesian funk bands and rockers were footnotes on the Indonesian music scene. These recordings – some of which were salvaged from imperfect vinyl pressings or wonky cassette copies – could have slipped into oblivion.

“I want these records to be able to tell a story,” says Alapatt, who up until July 2011, ran the hip-hop label Stones Throw and continues to manage one of the its most popular artists like the rapper/producer Madlib.

The label isn’t limited to archival projects though, as recent releases have showcased Swiss (Dimlite) and Californian (MRR–ADM) drum-centric electronica pastiches. The point of connection between the obscure slabs of vinyl and experimental club music might seem faint, but Now-Again’s releases are clearly made for that subspecies of vinyl-obsessive, crate-digging music nerds – basically, DJs.

This year, Now-and-Again has major projects of fuzzed-out rock from the southern African nation of Zambia and a set of unusual funk from Nigeria in its pipeline.

“I’m very proud of my role as an archivist,” says Alapatt. “I’ve always thought that a record collector is an archivist, even if he’s only sharing it with a limited number of people who cross the threshold and listen to his records with him.”