2008-08-28
So, I am sitting at my desk right now listening to side C of the Wee LP test pressing and hot damn it sounds good. This record makes me feel kind of randy, but in a non degenerate way. This kind of horn originates from the part of all of us that really wants the lit candles and the lavender scented bath oils. I don't want to "do it," I want to "
make loooove."
Which raises the question, will Numeroids be able to make that sweet sweet love to the LP version of Wee? It's not very sexy getting up (no pun intended) every 15 minutes to flip the record. Okay, so, put in the CD when your lady/man/ladyman friend comes over, no problem.
WRONG.
Do you think girls/dudes/Thai ladyboys are impressed by CDs?? You know they're not. I find CDs in the street all the time. In 5 years they won't even exist. What impresses your sweat-mate is that 12x12 piece of art with some weight to it. CDs are for teenagers to steal from Best Buy. Vinyl is for culture vultures (aka you, in their eyes) and therefore a good influence upon their nether regions.
So, how do we rectify this situation? How do me make love making co-habitable with the Wee LP? Do we introduce kinky moves which involve flipping the slab together?
I encourage all of you to figure it out for yourselves. I just wanted to warn you before it came up.
Yours,
Lovingly,
Sam
2008-07-28
The answer is Little Howling Wolf. HOW COOL IS THAT?? I guess it sort of escaped me or I forgot that he is a total Chicago landmark (and I mean that literally, dude is gigantic and absolutely RIPPED). But anyway, I met him and he gave me a really deep and complex musicology of himself and also of Jamaica and mostly of steel drums.
YEAH LITTLE HOWLING WOLF!
2008-07-15
I was thinking about the Three 6 Mafia album, the one that made white people think they were serious (which they have ALWAYS been, you ignorant fools),
Most Known Unknown. Not the album so much as the album title. You could apply that sort of vague-album-title-sentiment to what we do here at Numero. These albums we get our greasy sausage fingers on, some are things that serious heads have known about for a while (our upcoming Titan project, Twinight) while others are tangents we pick up upon and curate as we see fit (Ladies, Gospel-funk, kidsoul). Regardless, we are dealing with specifically sought out unknowns; holes and absences in history which we nerd out on in hopes that you will too.
Recently, something we weren't even looking for found us. It didn't come out of any curatorial exercise or head-wax needing to be reissued. It came out of a personal relationship with an artist whose Most Known Unknown status had gotten his band a place in history as part of the Twinight 45 legacy.
Darrow Kennedy of
the Kaldirons came by the office one day with some reels of his post-Twinight band, The Final Solution and told us to take a listen if we could find something to play it on. Well we could and it was
Brotherman on those tapes. The soundtrack to the unmade, unwritten film Brotherman is going to be Numero release number 022. We've got the promos in and they sound really killer. It's a hell-of-unique album with dense Curtis-esque harmonies and some seriously Sonny-Sharrocked-out accidentally-no-wave guitar.
Anyway, here is a perfect example of the most known unknowns in action. Were it not for the equally obscure Kaldirons, we would never have heard this killer album and neither would you. Thank god for holes in history.
Just a thought,
-Sam
P.S. We'll be at the Pitchfork Festival this weekend if any of y'all are coming/going, so come down and say hi! We've got a booth somewhere and we've got stuff for sale at hot-discount prices (it's our "Still In Business Sale"). We'll have awesome limited edition
Brotherman cassettes (get it? "out now on Numero records & tapes") as well as equally limited individual wax packs of the trading cards, neither of which are for sale on this godforsaken website.
2008-01-21
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE INTERSLICE, THE NUMERO GROUP (BUT MOSTLY JUST SAM)PRESENTS 2008 SO FAR IN PICTURES!!
Since getting back to Chicago from my various research expeditions and pleasure cruises, I got a new crappy cell phone with which I have been taking a lot of blurry low-res pictures. Here are some of those things I said!
That is my roommate Tamia, she really looks like that, don't laugh.
This is one of other roommates, Lee, holding two of my favorite albums and standing besides our stuffed plant. She looks happy, but nervous?
This is just a "nice thing" I saw after seeing some really great music at this house party at my friend Lucy's house. I don't usually go for contemporary rock bands, but this band I saw Outpost, they were really up my alley. Think Neil Young's
Zuma as covered by the Silver Jews pretending to be both Jethro Tull and Fleetwood Mac. I mean, that's just what I heard. I loved it, though.
Check them out here.
Also at this party were two of my favorite cats ever: Boris, who is huge, and Soda, who is tiny.
Finally, did you know that Laurie's Planet of Sound in Lincoln Square has its own Numero Section?? Thanks guys! We like you too! I just got an 180 gram
Song Cycle by VDP there for a very reasonable price. Vincent Price?
2008 is cool,
-Sam Davis.
2007-11-30
Okay, so:
Almost every day, Mr. Rob Sevier and myself walk a half block north of our offices and one block west to have lunch at a Guadalajaran cafe and carniceria plopped down right in the middle of an otherwise residential neighborhood. The guys running the place don't really speak English and, despite growing up in L.A. my whole life, I don't speak much Spanish and neither does Rob. We try our best and after a few rounds of receiving delicious plates that were completely different than what we ordered, we are now able to sit down and semi-confidently order exactly what we want.
One of my roommates, Benny, has lived in both Guatemala and Spain and speaks Spanish fairly fluently. Sometimes, after a particularly confusing lunch, I will come home and ask said roommate to translate a few key words for me. The folks at the cafe practice their English on me, I practice my Spanish on them. Today, I ordered a chorizo and egg burrito (I have eaten probably too much chorizo in my time, but this is the absolute best I've ever had) and I placed this order almost entirely in Spanish. Sure, I mumbled it, I'm pretty shy about gringoing-out to such cool people, but I was pretty sure the guy understood what I said.
So, I'm waiting for my burrito, drinking a Mexican Coke and sipping a really delicious mussel and shrimp soup, getting reminded of where I grew up and generally kind of spacing out (I was up pretty late seeing Peter Brotzmann play with Paal Nilssen-Love [sp?]). My burrito was ready. I lit up a cheap cigarette and started walking back to the office, excited about once again indulging in a perfect pile of chorizo.
We're pretty busy here all the time, so, it's not uncommon that my lunch is rushed and in the office while I do other things. I was eating this burrito so fast, in fact, that I almost missed the GIANT CHUNK OF RAW BEEF THAT I SPIT OUT ONTO THE TABLE AND ALMOST MADE ME THROW UP.
You're thinking: Oh this meat eating fascist doesn't care what he eats, why didn't he swallow it down? I have a lot of food neuroses and aside from the obvious problems raw meat can create, beef is a big no-no for me.
The point of this story is, I'm really sad because I loved that place and now I don't want to go for a while. Also I will have psychosematic stomach pains for the rest of the day.
The End.
-Sam
