"SHE’S been championing weird synth music since she was, like, 10,” is how Stones Throw boss and fellow American music guru Peanut Butter Wolf recently summed up the Minimal Wave label founder Veronica Vasicka’s contribution to the music she loves. Vasicka, who plays Glasgow tomorrow, laughs at the line at first, but then tells a story that suggests she wasn’t only championing weird synth music at the age of 10, but making some form of it as well.

“I guess he’s talking there about the fact that I got my first keyboard when I was 10,” says Vasicka, who was born and raised in New York to a Uruguayan mother and Czech father. “It was the Casio SK1, which was a mini sampling keyboard, and getting it quickly got me into sampling strange sounds – my voice, sounds from the TV and radio, and whatever else I could find.

"Around that time I also got a yellow Sony Walkman, which you could record things on. It was actually quite advanced technology, and I would just go out with it and take endless field recordings, without knowing what field recordings were, of course. So I was constantly playing around with all the sounds I suddenly found I could make and record. I wouldn’t say I was making music out of it exactly, but I was definitely making something.”

Whatever the merits of those childhood recordings, Vasicka has in her adult years come to be recognised as one of the most dedicated and single-minded people in electronic music. The Minimal Wave label (which Vasicka reserves exclusively for older music, while the Cititrax sub-label releases new material) is the undisputed standard-bearer for the minimal synth and cold wave renaissance, and the commitment and tenacity she has shown in making it so has been extraordinary. Many, if not most, of the records she re-releases were originally put out in small batches of cassettes (200, or fewer in some cases) in the 1980s, and she has spent thousands of hours unearthing them, and often even more trying to actually track down the artists responsible.

Through most of the 1990s Vasicka concentrated on photography, studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and photographing bands and artists for music magazines. The development that set her on the path she has followed ever since, however, was getting a show on East Village Radio in 2003.

“I did the show for two hours every Sunday for 10 years,” she begins. “And I really wanted to give people new content every week, so I spent a lot of time unearthing and discovering old records for that – so much that it was almost like an intense course of study in the subject. I gathered so much stuff during that time that I still have cassettes or records that I haven’t yet managed to listen to, or have only heard a couple of times. There’s such a vast amount of it out there.”

The previously lost names from Belgium (Bene Gesserit), Spain (Esplendor Geométrico) France (Martin Dupont), the Netherlands (Das Ding), the US (Crash Course In Science) and beyond on the two Minimal Wave Tapes compilations the label has released so far are an excellent starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the music Vasicka has dedicated her life to exposing.

“I like the term archaeologist,” she continues, on an oft-repeated description of what she does. “It’s to do with digging, and trying to shed light on old music that maybe wasn’t well recognised in the period when it was created. And the thing is that it’s not just vinyl, it’s cassette tapes too, and band posters, album inserts, and other kinds of memorabilia.

“This music has such an interesting design aspect to it, and I love exploring that as much as the actual music. These days it’s different because many of these artists are on Facebook or can be found elsewhere on the web, but in 2005 when I started it was a lot more difficult to track people down, so I spent a lot of time doing that too.”

Although many of the artists unearthed by Vasicka have chosen to remain in obscurity, some have gone on to have remarkable second lives as a result of her patronage of sounds they made 30 or 40 years ago. In Aeternam Vale, from France, for example, ran a small label in the early 1980s, self-releasing a lot of cassettes but never performing live.

“We released a 12-inch by him a few years ago, though,” Vasicka recalls, “and he started getting all these booking requests. His career has really taken off ever since and now he’s really prolific and admired. In the 1980s he had a presence but only in a very small, contained scene in France, but now he constantly gets requests to play the best clubs in Europe.

“When he started in the 1970s and 80s he had a partner who played guitar and he would do these fuzzed-out guitar tracks that were really punky and playful, but his sound evolved and now he makes really dance floor-oriented stuff for huge clubs. We keep trying to get him to play in New York but it’s hard as he has so many European requests that overshadow our budget.”

And what exactly is it about this music that people seem to like so much, now that we’re several years into a resurgence in the sound that shows no sign of abating anytime soon? “I think it’s because it’s simplistic and it delivers an immediate message,” Vasicka says. “It’s not very complex for the most part, which makes it easily accessible, but I also think it’s a reminder of what went on before computers and the internet and the recent huge shift in technology happened. It’s a reminder of this hand-made aspect that’s lost now, but that people want to revisit.”

Veronica Vasicka plays at La Cheetah on Friday, February 10