The Vinyl Road Trip

Have you ever thought about just hopping in a car, exploring the country, and stopping at every opportunity you have to find records? It's the type of thing many of us vinyl lovers dream about but few ever actually do.

For Joe Wallace of Turntabling.net, that dream just became a reality. This past week, Joe kicked off his 1300-mile Vinyl Buying Road Trip starting in Chicago and ending in San Antonio. Here's his initial post from his site:

Today, the great Turntabling road trip begins–a long, winding journey by rail and by car in search of black wax platters-the odd, the unusual, and the obscure. Staring in Chicago, ending in San Antonio, Texas, the road winds through two Springfields (Illinois and Missouri), Oklahoma City and Norman, Dallas, Austin and finally San Antonio. There will be blog posts along the way and it should be an amusing voyage, to be sure.

The best part about a trip like this is the frequent stops, and if you know of an indie record store that definitely must be seen along the way (I-55 to I44, I-44 to I-35 is roughly THE journey, pretty simple, eh?) please drop a line in the comments section. This is a first for Turntabling, it should be an excellent adventure. More updates from the road!

We wish Joe the best of luck and look forward to hearing updates from the road. He will be posting blog entries from the road on Turntabling.net. In the meantime, you can keep up to date with him on Twitter here.

Now live: My Analog Apartment updates

We just launched some updates to our record collecting app, my.analogapartment.com. 

In this update, we focused on making it easy to keep track of the records you have AND the records you want. We even added a handy print feature so you can take your wishlist with you to the local stores, record fairs, and garage/stoop sales.

Here's what's new:

The home page

From the home page, you have the option to get started by entering a record you have or a record you want. All you need to provide is the album and the artist and we'll walk you through either creating your new account or adding it to your existing account.

The Interface

Once log in, you'll notice two main tabs on the top left titled "My Collection" and "My Wishlist". 

My Collection - A list of the records you have. To add a new record to your collection, simply click the "+" button on the bottom left of the screen.

My Wishlist - A list of the records you want. To add a new record to your wishlist, simply click the "+" button at the bottom left of the screen. To print your wishlist, click the "Print" link on the bottom right of the interface.

We hope you enjoy the simplified interface and wishlist features. We're in the process of designing our next batch of really exciting enhancements so stay tuned. 

Thanks and feel free to let us know if you have any problems, questions, or ideas.

The Numero Group

NUM003: Light: On The South Side (Release Date: 11/24/2009)

This morning, I spent some time browsing the brilliantly curated catalog of The Numero Group. Numero, an archival record label, researches, compiles, and preserves the work of great artists who found little commercial success upon releasing their albums.

Combined with stories and photographs about the artists, their labels, and the time period, the Numero compilations shine a light on great music and the stories behind it (both of which you probably never heard before).

You can listen to and read previews from each of their compilations in the online catalog. Most of them are available in vinyl. I especially love the Eccentric Soul series, starting at Capsoul Records in NUM001.

Here's a bit about them from their site. I love what they stand for.

Anything but another record label. Please, we don't need another one of those clogging up the bins. Accountants with coke habits, lawyers using Pitchfork as a tip sheet, 60 year-old executives awkwardly trying to converse with 17 year-old groupies. Marketing meetings. Junior VP's.

Enter the Numero Group. Founded by Tom Lunt, Rob Sevier, and Ken Shipley in 2003, the three self-proclaimed "record obsessives" decided to approach the record business backwards. No corporate hierarchy; no company stationary. Just a big pile of music that no one had ever heard of.

The mission was simple: to dig deep into the recesses of our record collections with the goal of finding the dustiest gems begging to be released from their exile on geek street. No longer would $500 singles sit in a temperature-controlled room dying for a chance to be played. No more would the artists, writers, and entrepreneurs who made these records happen go unknown and unappreciated.

Numero releases are sound with substance, living at the nexus of song and story. Scrupulously researched, painstakingly re-mastered, and with an attention to detail that is unmatched in the reissue field, the end result is a top-of-the-line compact disc (and LPs)

There is no "Numero" sound; instead, Numero offers an aesthetic. A shelf of Numero discs feels less like a "record collection" and more like a library. The library to date is a mix of thrift shop soul, skinny tie pop, Belizean funk, and hillbilly gospel. Numero makes records for people who may have everything from indigenous Central American drumming to Canadian chanteuses stacked next to their CD players.

Useful links

• Browse the entire Numero catalog here.
• Numero: Digital Dig - Dig through alphabetized "boxes" of artists, read their stories, and preview their work
• An interview with Ken Shipley of Numero over on Pitchfork from 2006 here. 

Album cover art books

We've written about a number of album cover art books here in the past. To save you some time, we went ahead and put together a list of the 22 album cover art books we were able to find over on Amazon. 

Shakey's Record Fair - Brooklyn - Sept 22

The next Shakey's Record Fair is tomorrow night, September 22nd, here in Brooklyn. Fair starts at 7:00 PM. For more information, stop by the site here.

We'll probably be stopping by so if you see a nerdy looking guy in an Analog Apartment t-shirt, say hello.