Stories

Being a teenager in the American suburbs of the 1980s and ‘90s often meant that your ideals seemed to outpace your surroundings. By the early 1990s, as a generation came of age that was too young to have seen Black Flag or Minor Threat, straight edge had started to...

It used to take more than a Distrokid account and cracked version of Ableton to get your music into the world. Back in the Before Times, an artist had two choices when it came to releasing an album: convince a record label or call the local pressing plant. Tens of thousands of...

“We were all so young. This was really the first time that we were on our own without adults. There was this sense of our first real freedom.”—Craig Erickson

It's easy to think of America in the 1960s as a rock-obsessed, LSD-chugging, free-loving Dionysia. The reality was much more conservative. Hungover from the Eisenhower-Kennedy hi-ball years, artists and consumers alike were obsessed with...

By 1997, emo was in the early throes of its first evolution since erupting out of the D.C. hardcore scene a dozen years earlier. This new wave was ...

Ohio’s Oberlin College has been a breeding ground for the struggling artist set since its 1833 founding. Poets, playwrights, authors, screenwriters...

“Well, you know a ‘love apple’ is a tomato,” explains vocalist Annette Warren. “And we didn’t want to be called ‘Tomato.’” So the Love Apple name—i...

Manhattan's Wurlitzer Building, Floor #8, Room 551. Spring, 1977. The cheapest custom studio in New York City has cut their hourly rate in half to ...

“The radio stations that played Spanish music had what they called ‘English Oldies.’ The deejay would play the Spanish songs but then he would pick...

California mail-order mystic Master Wilburn Burchette was first known from his ads, hidden in the back pages of Fate Magazine, Beyond Reality, and...

Hi All - You may have noticed that a lot of items are sold out or we are unable to ship to you for now. We are currently in the process of adding a...

More a Patterson exurb than a New York City suburb, Haledon, New Jersey, had seen the passage of a handful of meaningless garage combos, two of whi...

The White Birch, ca. 1899 Stephen Immerwahr: I first saw Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The White Birch in 1990 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and loved...

  Branko Mataja (1923-2000) was born in the small costal town of Bekar, then part of Dalmatia, now Croatia. Shortly after that, Branko's family rel...

Bedhead began with two brothers—the Kadanes. Bubba two years older than Matt, they were from Wichita Falls, a small city in Texas about 120 miles n...

Cutting what may’ve been the Ebirac label’s finest recorded moment, Caribe pulled out all the stops for La Solución's final album. Mi Barrio se Quemo (My Neighborhood is Burning) attempted to address growing pains in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, where white flight was driving down property values and landowners turned to arson in their attempts to squeeze what value they could out of buildings left fallow. 

Four years in the making, this box set seeks not to finalize the Syl Johnson story but simply to set its foundations in stone. After three years drifting rudderless through phone calls, meetings, and off-the-cuff interviews, the still-childlike Syl—sporting Karl Kani knock-off jeans and his Obama cap slightly askew—finally relented.

Lamont Dixon’s sketch on the back cover of this album says just as much about Norman Whiteside as the songs contained herein. An eyes-skyward dream...

It’s 1979 in Glens Falls, New York, and 18-year-old Alan Dunham hurries down the stairs into the basement of his folks’ home — his laboratory. As p...

Recorded in 1974 under the auspices of a senior project at a small Quaker boarding school in Newtown, Pennsylvania, “Eternal Life” is the product o...

Independence has always been full of holes: subterranean tunnels, secret passages, mines, hidden hollows, and reverberating caverns. A place tailor...

*December 12, 1971, was an active news day in Costa Rica. Although hijackings were commonly reported items for a region embroiled in Communism’s tu...

1. If you were a young punk living in the Bay Area in the early ’90s, broke to the point of destitution, and still eager to use what few dollars y...

A half-generation or more too old to go the way of full-on love beads, kaftans and impulsively imbibing Owsley Stanley’s fine-tuned lysergic acid d...

Sometimes, simply saying “I love you” isn’t an available option. Sometimes, because it’s both forbidden and impossible, a person’s feelings go unex...

Calvin Johnson, not yet 30 years old, was already an elder statesman of Olympia’s music scene. More importantly, he was its biggest booster. “I alw...

George Shaw doesn’t mind being a punchline. No, really: When the trumpeter recalls how one friend referred to the groovy, slick innovations he and ...

It was a chilly Monday night in November 1991. Two sisters were about to take the stage at the Ace of Clubs in Nashville, Tennessee, for a performa...

Run out of a former aerobics studio, Tim Jackson and Carolyn Schmitt’s Adult Crash clothing and record boutique was the first shop I ever visited w...

At the crest of his mid-20s, Andre Gibson, a native of the Washington Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, was nearly a decade deep into a sp...

On any balmy evening in late-1960s suburban Paris, a young Isabelle Powaga drifts toward sleep, her mother intoning melodies borrowed from Antonio...

At the crest of 2018 I moved to Los Angeles. It was a long-gestating idea, dating back to before I founded Numero with my partner Rob Sevier in 200...

“Tax Scam Records” is a phrase that was coined by collectors to identify albums that are believed to have been manufactured for the sole purpose of...

Tucked away in St. Anne’s Court in London’s Soho district, Trident Studios was the site of countless classic recording sessions in the late 1960s a...

Swingin’ London in 1968 was bright with the still-exploding plastic inevitable: street fighting students, underground art happenings, rock and roll...

In the late 1960s, tuition at the University of Illinois—the flagship state school in the Champaign-Urbana metropolitan area—was a meager $400 a ye...

At the end of the Future of What tour, in May 1995, each member of Unwound went home with a $1,500 profit share. The deal Unwound signed with BMG a...

During the Brandt years, Vern had typically been a silent partner. “My job back then was the van,” he said. “Making sure we could get from point A ...

One night I was sitting with a friend in an alley outside a show. He told me that he had quit his band that day. My friend Brandt had been the drum...

For Unwound, the process was this: meet other freaks at school and become friends; practice relentlessly; perform with energy and volume; tour and ...

Late in February, 1977, University of Minnesota students Larry Falk and Lisa Henrickson traveled to Chris Moon’s Moonsound Studios on assignment fo...

In the 1976 hardbound volume Minnesota’s Black Community, publisher Walter R. Scott profiles the state’s African Americans, in 18 chapters includin...

After flipping their car on a snowy stretch of road between Fargo, North Dakota, and their hometown of St. Paul, Minneapolis, Pierre and Andre Lewi...

During 1972’s summer, 13-year-old James Harris III was enrolled in Upward Bound, an enrichment program on the University of Minnesota’s campus desi...

As the 1980s came in, Herman Jones had earned his ski-legs on stages inside such lodges as Duluth’s Spirit Mountain and Trollhaugen of Dresser, Wis...

Pepe Willie was more of a sapling than a seed when he arrived in Minneapolis in the early ’70s. Raised in Brooklyn, he got his first tastes of the ...

In the late 1970s, a peculiar sound began to bubble up out of the City of Lakes, in its land of 10,000 freshwater bodies. Isolated in the upper Mid...

An era was finding its end. Union Planters National Bank had finally pulled up the roots of Stax Records, leaving hundreds of musicians locked out ...

In his own words, the story of Archie James Cavanaugh: I was born in Wrangell and raised in Kake, Alaska, a predominantly Tlingit community located...

In April of 1979, the lone long-playing release by Father’s Children hit retail and radio with a dull thud. It had been a down spring for Mercury R...

Robert Hosea Williams was born in 1936 in tiny Princeton, Indiana. His father, Albert Williams, was far too ambitious to stay put in Princeton, a t...

Fujimo Records, an acronym for “Fuck U Jack, I’m movin’ on,” was an unlikely destination for a trio of high school Methodists from Etna Green, Indi...

In March of 1987 I ventured to Berkeley for a punk rock show with a slightly older kid named Ben (later changed to "Claude"). I was headed for the ...

It was three days from Austin, Texas, to Olympia, Washington, by Greyhound, and what Sean McManus remembered best about the journey, which he embar...

San Antonio, Texas, in the late 1970s was a city of 650,000 residents on the verge of a real estate and population explosion. A Chicano soul and Te...

Sometime in the mid-'70s, a young country singer named Kathy Heideman walked into Tiki Studios in San Jose, California to do a job. She was there t...

When it came to rhythm and blues and rock and roll recording activity during the late 1950s and early ’60s, Los Angeles truly was the wild West. Th...

The '80s live in the 800 Line, Numero Group’s new series of low-cost, high-quality repros and collections from that glorious decade where America’s...

By the summer of 1971, Caroline Peyton and Mark Bingham had the bulk of Mock Up safely in the can. Their well-practiced thumbs were getting them ri...

The story of Jackie Shane is the story of one of the greatest unsung soul singers of the 1960s. It is the story of an African-American transgender ...

The life and music of Charlie Megira are more dream than reality, a reverie concocted by the mind in the throes of a fever, a welcome hallucination...

In the early 20th century, Milwaukee was culturally vibrant and politically progressive. Closer in many ways to Central Europe than the American Mi...

My friends and I called them Indian ​Bummer​. A library in Cupertino. Not really a venue, more of a community space that also holds local Girl Scou...

In November of 1948 16-year-old Don McGinnis, his parents, and siblings drove cross country from North Carolina to Los Angeles. “There were ten of ...

Our beloved friend Joanna Brouk passed away April 28, 2017 after a brief battle with cancer, just as the world was finally starting to catch up wit...

It’s 2014 in Melbourne, Australia, and on the program of the Next Wave Festival is a piece described as “Neo-Paganism, Pop Divas, YouTube, Yoga and...

Owing to its incomparable selection of analog field recordings and their remarkable provenance, and to its impeccable UI (user interface) —our firs...

After years singing country and gospel tunes on the family ranch in the Verde Valley, in 1960 Arizona singer-guitarist Alvie Self recorded a rockab...

Buried within the 1,200 Cuca master tapes, a ceiling-high tower of cardboard Home Depot boxes, sat a small collection of forgotten master tapes. Or...

In 1986 Belgian synth-pop trio Elisa Waut scored a regional hit with “Four Times More.” The tune was de rigueur in the pop landscape occupied by Th...

Benjamin Trey Gruber 3.13.1991—9.12.2017 Trey Gruber had a vitality that latched onto every facet of his music. He wrote sensitive and devastating...

Riding the crest of West Hollywood’s break into Beverly Hills and covering a modest 2.7-mile stretch of California desert in concrete, Doheny Drive...

For us, taking time to explore the more esoteric possibilities of our creative practice provides a deeper understanding of the resulting piece of w...

As long-time advocates for Jordan De La Sierra's work with sound, we at the Numero Group herein share with our listeners and our readers our collec...

Somewhere in the rolling cypress hills of rural Sonoma County, California, a box of old crystal wine glasses sits, collecting dust. Probably a comm...

Issued quietly in the dead of 1991 on compact disc, Windows and Light is Suse Milleman’s only album. The synthetic, balearic album “came out of liv...

In a cottage behind Tinseltown landmark Hollywood United Methodist Church, Chip Weitzner forged an entire world. Astral Travels, released in 1979, ...

The second issue of our semi-annual publication Periodical Numerical continues the mission of diving deeper into the vast Numero Group universes. E...

Illustrator Benjamin Marra entered our orbit a few years back when we began working on Warfaring Strangers: Acid Nightmares. Our original pitch des...

I got about 50 copies out there, and that’s when everything got tough Los Angeles locals know Tony Palkovic from his long-running show on KPSC comm...

Anyone can throw a new coat of paint on a house, so we decided to knock down the building and start from scratch. The Numero Group announced itse...

Perhaps best known as the musical director Tennessee Ernie Ford or Burt Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” television program, Jack Fascinato was ...

As usual, it was past midnight when Tommy Falcone pulled into New York City with a car full of teenagers. The yellow glow and tile walls of the Lin...

Naomi Lewis’ Cottage Songs and Seagulls and Sunflowers have long been prized by collectors for their superior production quality, and poetical expe...

Picture a transparent plastic sheet placed over an image on a light projector. A lecturer draws diagrams all over it in erasable marker in order to...