“Hi. I would like to borrow a little of your time.”
Stone Coal White, “Peoples” Eccentric Ohio Soul
Numero Group, once a reissue record label, has become a content creator steering our musical tastes. And they reissue records. In their own words, they describe their ongoing mission as “unearthing precious lost sounds for new audiences.” By new audiences we can read: everyone. Because Numero Group’s most significant contribution is to the development of the art of the streaming playlist.
Numero Group began this work in 2003 Chicago, releasing Midwestern soul records, 50s country, and Belgian Bossa nova. Their interests and production included a reissue of Blonde Redhead’s debut, a box set of Ork Records “the world’s first punk record label,” and a significant amount of gospel, disco, and electronic music from around the world. Among these are the best and most influential of Numero Group’s records: Cult Cargo Grand Bahama Goombay, The ABC’s of Kid’s Soul, Wayfaring Strangers Guitar Soli, and the “Eccentric” collections, which highlight the songs of specific genres, locations, and labels. Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label was the first release, NUM001. Eccentric Funk, Eccentric Disco, Eccentric R&B, several more takes of Eccentric Soul followed. The flawless Eccentric Deep Soul sits at NUM506: thirteen songs, starting with “All Along I’ve Loved You” by Tony Ashly & The Delicates and ending with “I Want to Apologize” by Harvey Scales & The Seven Sounds. This year Numero Group celebrates twenty years as a label with more reissues, more collections, more box sets, and more colored vinyl collector’s editions. It can be a little overwhelming. But imagine how they feel, trying to return as much that is precious from all that is lost.
“At the end of days we know that life often puts us on different paths. We should have the goodness through these times and know that baleful experience makes us grow.” Silhouette Brown, “Casualties of Honey” Visible and Invisible
Consider Numero Group’s Cuca: Sauk City, Wisconsin. Cuca Records was an independent label operating outside Madison, WI from 1959 to 1973. Their recorded library was purchased by Numero Group in 2021 with a steady stream of releases since. According to Sarah Filzen in her thesis “The History of Cuca Records” (1998) the label’s founder Jim Kirchstein didn’t charge for his engineering. Instead, the acts agreed to purchase a certain number of vinyl records and Mr. Kirchstein made his money as a middleman between the artists and the pressing plant. This resulted in thousands of recordings of rockabilly, country, high lonesome, soul, gospel, and polka; most of which came from central Wisconsin, within a couple hours of Sauk City. Birdlegs & Pauline, Julie Durocher, Harvey Scales, the early rockers on Spare Parts from the Cuca Garage, all at once, same place, getting their chance. Cuca Records and Numero Group have blessed our timeline with these numbers.
There is so much good music and too many places to look for it. At the same time Cuca was in operation, the Target Label operated in Appleton and Phau Records was happening in Milwaukee. That’s all just Wisconsin. Sauk City is three hours from Chicago which had an RCA pressing plant, a RCA-Victor studio, studios for Columbia Records and Decca, and independent labels like Chess, Delmark, and Vee-Jay. Sauk City is also three hours from Minneapolis, with its own transpiring magic (hear: Eccentric Minneapolis Sound, or the 4LP set Purple Snow). So many people have been, and are, making good, great, fascinating music. What we really need is an intelligent and accessible curation and delivery system.
“Just want to push somebody, your body won’t let you. Just want to move somebody, body won’t let you want to. Feel somebody? Body won’t let you. Who? Who? Who do you talk to? Who do you talk to?” Mary Margaret O’Hara, “Body’s in Trouble” Cloudbusting: The Numero Guide to Ecto.
There are plenty of reasons to reject streaming music. Many independent bands (including my own) once subsisted on the sale of physical media. The algorithm narrows taste as much as it expands them. These are huge corporate entities with intentions and ambitions that have nothing to do with the creation or appreciation of art. But it is accessible. More people have phones than tape decks, CDs, or record players.
Streaming revenue is not a great deal for artists. Twenty years ago, while Numero Group formed in Chicago, my friend Jeff and I were in Lawrence, Kansas forming the band Drakkar Sauna. We’ve put out six albums and played hundreds and hundreds of shows. We have something like sixty thousand streams on Spotify. We are on YouTube, Instagram, Apple Music, TikTok, etc. We’ve made less money than we pay the services to host the songs. Much less, and yet we pay. Because that’s how people will hear us, and sixty thousand plays is significant to us even if it isn’t to them. An opaque system for revenue sharing is the record industry 1890 to the present. See Steve Albini’s excellent “The Problem with Music” for more on the subject, or the life experiences of Big Momma Thornton, composer of the song “Hound Dog.” Didn’t publishers steal Stephen Foster’s scores? Yes, they did. It’s a wonder any new music ever gets made. In this economy? Art is a miracle and a terrible business decision. But the day Spotify flickers off is not the day that changes, or even necessarily improves.
But to bring this boat back around: accessibility is vital and compilations are often more accessible. Shell Gas Station’s Cruisin Classics is how I first heard Aretha Franklin, and The Byrds. My introduction to Leonard Cohen was as the composer of the “Concrete Blonde” song on Pump Up the Volume: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Same goes for Bob Dylan, vis a vis Edie Brickell and Born on the Fourth of July.
In my childhood the only music I heard was on compilations. The Beatles Past Masters, Beaches Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Hank Williams 20 Greatest Hits. It was those and the mixtapes my brother and I recorded off Tri-County FM radio on Maxell blanks. My earliest specific musical memory was feeling angry with myself for falling asleep and missing the chance to record Bryan Adams #1 hit “Run to You” on Q102’s nightly Top 20. Being #1 meant it didn’t play until nearly 10pm and remained, for me, bitterly uncompiled.
It is through the playlists that Numero Group’s compilations expand in influence and become prescient of the current state of music. Twenty years after their start, the compilation, the Playlist, defines this moment as much as the LP defined the late 1960s. With one hundred and twelve public playlists on Spotify, Numero Group has elevated the form. They wield with skill and delight the most interesting development in music listening since headphones.
Playlists, both curated and algorithmic, have altered how we relate to music. We speak of the algorithm “feeding us” songs. I say this and you may respond, “It’s the same thing as a mixtape” or, “We did that, too, we just burned them on CD.” Which would be true if those mixtapes or burned CDs had no size limitations, if they could be endlessly duplicated, made accessible to anyone with a phone, were a synecdoche for a culture of availability, and were put to use expanding and deepening the intelligence of robots. Streaming music is a descendant of Sam Goody and the telegraph, but the playlist was born of poetry and the tic-tac-toe scene at the end of Wargames.
“Now I’ve got my own idea to stop time right where it is. Like an old time movie on rerun I had to forget all that was said and done.” John Washington, “Burn the Calendar,” Eccentric Ohio Soul
Early in the history of television there were alternate designs. One was a mechanical version and in the very early days, the late 1930s, it seemed preferable. It was both more familiar and more reliable. But for the influence of the RCA corporation, the early standard for television would have been mechanical. Our grandparents and great grandparents wouldn’t have turned on their TVs, they would have started them, like lawnmowers. Which is only to take the long way round to say: With any development or technology, it didn’t have to be this way. It happens to be this way. The concept of “For You” or “You May Also Like” are design decisions. Like whether or not people should have to put fuel in their TV sets.
“If you’re like me, you’ll remember it like anybody remembers.” Bill Withers, “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” Broken Arrows: The Numero Group Guide to Black Vietnam
Numero Group creates new genres in which to consider these songs. Cosmicpolitan, billed as “Odes to Billie Joe, swamp sisters, and a fading American south” but which sounds to me like the 70s mainstream slowly responding to both Charles Manson and Joan Didion. Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space is a 192 song, 15 and a half hour playlist described as “Successful experiments in sci fi soul. Get spaced out.” Do Errol Stubbs’ “Just a Little Love,” Gary Wilson’s “She Makes Me Think of Endicott,” and Janelle Monáe’s “Mushrooms & Roses” speak in the same code, from the same place? Asked and answered. Not only do they belong together, they are together. Numero Group’s playlists have informed the algorithm this::that.
Now sit back and hear it on your feed.
Nick Cave recently wrote “perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI — that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go.” Could be. But can we also speculate that the algorithm is an old sentience, an old type of consciousness, like wasps or mushrooms? Consciousness turning simple input into thoughtful action. And in that way, might it not be a more familiar consciousness to the universe than Frank Zappa’s, or Tommy Munday’s, or yours? I like to think that the continuing deployment of AI will force us to see the sentience in those other organic intelligences we’re exposed to. Imagine: a playlist, so complete, logical, paradoxical, self referential, compelling, al alcance de todos, and interesting that it sees itself in the beehive, the old growth forest, and finally explains them to us.
“They say it’s foolish to dream.” Bonnie Guitar, “Dream Dreamers,” Country Dreamin
We’ve just about reached the point where the digital explosion between 2002 and 2008 is going to be well and truly rediscovered. I don’t know if we’re ready. Are you prepared for the MySpace archives to be combed through for their lost, precious sounds? For every burned CD to be given a new listen? I’m not sure, but honestly I hope. I dream about Numero Group’s Eccentric Midwest or or The ABC’s of New New American Weird. And if Drakkar Sauna doesn’t earn a place on it, I hope to see our contemporaries there: The Working Poor, J. Ashley Miller, Hope For Agoldensummer, Anita Fixx. There’s so much good, great, fascinating music to be found. As fans of the art we’re lucky for the discerning, thoughtful archivists and producers of Numero Group, and for supercomputers that connect with them.
Follow and include Numero Group songs among your favorites. Numero Group playlists reward you over time. It makes the algorithm — as it reveals itself to you — better. It will improve your experience, which is what we’re after, anyway; on both sides of the transaction.
- Teach Your Computer Musical Taste - June 16, 2023