The holiday shopping season has kicked into overdrive, and the Reader is helping to push. For the past few years I’ve been chipping in by picking my favorite box sets and reissues. Some of them have been widely covered already (especially the remarkable Bob Dylan set), but others are likely to be unfamiliar to you—these aren’t stocking stuffers or last-minute ideas. (I’ve reviewed the CD version of each, but several come in more expensive LP versions too.) The releases devoted to Designer Records and electroacoustic composer Akos Rozmann are geared to very specific types of listeners, but if you know folks with such curious ears, you could make someone very happy.

A small part of this splendid set is devoted to Boulez’s own compositions—including performances by his peerless Ensemble InterContemporain—but for the most part it offers a wonderful survey of modern European music, with an emphasis on the likes of Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, Bartok, and Webern. Since this behemoth was released last week, I’ve only spent a short time with it, but considering how little it costs per disc, I already feel comfortable declaring it an excellent investment.

William OnyeaborWilliam Onyeabor

(Luaka Bop) $69.99

Last fall Luaka Bop released Who Is William Onyeabor?, a single-disc compilation of material by this mysterious Nigerian, who made eight albums between 1977 and 1985 and then rejected music in favor of religion. As he told Mike Rubin in the New York Times last year, “I was a sinner who repented and gave himself 100 percent to Christ.” His fascinating homemade funk, powered by drum machines and analog synths, was pretty obscure even in his homeland, and the releases were all but invisible outside Nigeria. But in 2005 Luaka Bop included the track “You Better Change Your Mind” on the wonderful African psychedelic compilation Love’s a Real Thing, and soon the label began working on a compilation dedicated entirely to Onyeabor. The process dragged on for years, largely because the singer either appeared indifferent to the label’s efforts or obstructed them.

Like other Mosaic sets, this anthology includes lots of alternate takes and rigorous liner notes (written mostly by Russell himself). Most of this music was reissued in Japan by Toshiba in the mid-90s, in conjunction with British label Spotlite, which had released many Dial recordings on LP in the 70s. The Mosaic version features remastered versions restored by Steve Marlow and Chicagoan Jonathan Horwich using a digital process called “bit density processing,” which adds clarity and brightness to the horns and pianos and eliminates all kinds of surface noise; the downside is a whooshing quality to the sound of the drums, which can be a bit hard to take. Production quibbles aside, though, the music is as essential as it gets.

WilcoAlpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014

(Nonesuch) $31.99

It blows my mind sometimes to think that Wilco have been a band for two decades, but then I consider their dramatic developmental arc—artfully illustrated by this 77-track, four-disc compendium of demos, compilation tracks, B sides, and live material—and it no longer seems so surprising that it took Jeff Tweedy and his cohorts 20 years to cover all that ground. This package is clearly designed for the Wilco fanatic, but since that describes a huge subset of their listeners, it should find plenty of buyers. The first two discs focus on the years of the band’s first three albums, during which Wilco morphed from alt-­country standard-bearers to kaleidoscopic pop auteurs—to borrow a Tweedy phrase from the liner notes, “full-on pop music and not the kind of pop music that’s apparently popular.” Concerning a radio remix of “A Shot in the Arm” from 1999’s Summerteeth, done by David Kahne at the behest of Reprise, Tweedy writes, “It was a really good learning experience of what not to do—to trust other people with the vision of your music.” The remix’s hilariously dated, jacked-up beats clog up that wonderful song, underlining the cluelessness of the label that would soon reject Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.