Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past by Reynolds Simon

Author:Reynolds, Simon [Reynolds, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780571271801
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2011-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

SALVAGE AND HERITAGE

In terms of reverse-missionary zeal – bringing culture and the true musical faith to ignorant white folks – the undisputed world champion is Chicago’s Numero Group. They place the same emphasis on a consistent design aesthetic and top-quality sound restoration as Soul Jazz, but surpass their rivals through sheer obscurity. Numero Group specialise in music that barely even came out in its own day, recordings that are often hardly more than rumours in hardcore collector circles. Co-founder Ken Shipley told me that the label’s brand aura – the identical-looking CD spines – helps them sell music that’s devoid of even a smidgeon of name recognition or reputation.

Numero Group is less your standard niche-market-milking (and bilking) salvage operation, and more a grand sonic-reclamation project that blends aspects of archaeology and anthropology. Like Folkways, their releases document what Shipley calls ‘vernacular music culture’. Threading through the label’s catalogue are series that focus on a particular genre or city-based scenes. Shipley describes Eccentric Soul: Smart’s Palace, which focuses on a particular nightclub, as ‘taking a picture of what it was like to make music in Wichita, Kansas, in the sixties and seventies. It’s stuff for the library of the future.’

Along with ‘Eccentric Soul’, there are several other Numero Group ‘series’. ‘Cult Cargo’ looks at the impact of American music on foreign (usually Caribbean) music cultures; ‘Wayfaring Strangers’ trawls through the singer-songwriter boom of the seventies, folky Americana often released as privately pressed albums in small editions. But it’s the ‘Local Customs’ series that seems most to express the idealistic core of Numero Group. ‘In the old days a custom studio would be the one recording studio in a town, and people came in and made a record, and then a few weeks later they went to pick up anywhere from fifty to two hundred albums,’ Shipley explains. ‘So all kinds of music were getting recorded, and the guys who owned the studio and produced and engineered the recordings, they would effectively become these Alan Lomax figures, without necessarily intending to be.’ The word ‘customs’, then, doubles to mean both the site of music-making and the ethnographical notion of music as part of the fabric of a community’s life. The series’ debut release, Downriver Revival, sifted through the late-sixties/early-seventies catalogue of Ecorse, Michigan’s Double U Sound studio, which was owned by Felton Williams and largely self-built in his family basement. Double U’s backlog of released and unreleased recordings (300 reels of tape) offers a cross-section of virtually the entire musical activity within one black American community over the course of a decade. Confronted with such an ethnomusicological bonanza, Numero Group went overboard: accompanying the CD there’s a DVD containing a thirty-minute documentary, plus ‘a digital tape vault’ of some two hundred bonus audio recordings, from sermons and rehearsals to church recordings and a steel-guitar tutorial.

Talking with Shipley, I got a sense that what’s driving Numero Group isn’t just the reclamation of lost music but a kind of redemption, an impulse to make right.

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