Recorded during nightly sessions in Dublin between April and July 2001, and originally issued that autumn on Mille Plateaux, Together Is The New Alone stood out within the German label's celebrated catalogue from its first listen, an album whose title named a feeling we now have an entire vocabulary for, two decades before the rest of us had a word for it.

It was the second LP under Donnacha Costello's own name, and the record where the Irish producer fully emerged from his earlier work as Jayrod, a name under which he had spent the late 1990s producing house and techno tracks for the Dublin floor. Together with its predecessor Growing Up In Public (Force Inc, 2000) and the imprint Minimise he had founded in 1999, it announced a different Costello: introspective, patient, more interested in the edges of the dancefloor than its centre, and entirely his own.

The ten tracks move through and between idioms with a quietly unbothered fluency. Slack glitch hi-hats and stuttered click-figures from the Mille Plateaux toolbox carry melodic fragments that could pass for early Eno; piano chords surface inside structures that look, from a distance, like minimal techno but breathe more like ambient music. Slowly Sinking In opens on a hushed, slightly twitchy pulse; Awake On The Fifth Floor hangs in the air like first light through a window; In Spite Of Everything earns its seven minutes of melancholy piano without ever turning grand; Always A Part closes the album with a glitched, half-dissolved drum and bass figure threaded through haunting tones. There is no aspiration to the difficult here, and yet nothing feels easy. The result occupies a specifically Costello-shaped space within the early-2000s electronica field, less abstract than Vladislav Delay, less austere than the raster-noton end of things, less crystalline than the 12k axis, and warmer than most of what surrounded it on Mille Plateaux. It speaks the same vocabulary as those records, but with a vernacular intimacy that has only deepened with time.

This Keplar edition, marking the album's twentieth anniversary, presents Together Is The New Alone on vinyl for the first time, comprising all ten tracks of the original CD in the final, edited form Costello arrived at over the years, mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut by Lupo at Loop-O. Limited edition of 500 copies, with new artwork by Klar&Gut. A record whose title became prescient, and whose music has only become more so.