namelessnumberheadman - Wires Reply

A Complete Package

Story by Pete Dulin. Photograph by Ellen McAllister.

Published: Wednesday, October 24, 2007

namelessnumberheadman 490

A limited edition with one-of-a-kind artwork creates exclusivity and novelty, but that’s not the point here. It’s about savoring presentation and sensory experience before listening to the music itself.

Presentation
Does music packaging, such as namelessnumberheadman’s do-it-yourself CD sleeve for Wires Reply, still matter? A vinyl aficionado can deliver a sermon on the coolness of artwork found on a treasured album, a vintage copy of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers with working zipper, for example. Well-designed packaging is a growing rarity in the digital age of mass reproduction and corporate cost cutting. Vinyl record covers are not the only format taking a hit. The average CD lacks eye-popping cover art or simply a distinctive look.

Apple guru Steve Jobs once infamously declared, “The album is obsolete.” With digital sales of individual songs rising markedly, that statement might seem prescient if a bit self-serving. Overall, global online music sales nearly doubled in 2006 to about $2 billion, or 10 percent of all sales, but failed to compensate for an overall decline in sales of CDs, according to recording industry reports. As the purchasing habits of consumers change, will the tactile pleasure and visual anticipation of opening an album or CD grow less important? Downloading and listening to music online is an efficient way to acquire tunes, but it’s a cold and lifeless process of storing bytes on a device.

This brings us back to Wires Reply, the limited edition EP released in April 2007 on the St. Ives label, recorded by multi-instrumentalists Andrew Sallee, Chuck Whittington, and Jason Lewis who perform as namelessnumberheadman. Three hundred vinyl copies of the record were pressed and are available through the label. The band also created handmade covers for a limited number of copies in CD form that are self-distributed. Indie bands often create, or find a friendly designer to develop, cover art on a small or nonexistent budget. In this case, the band applied hand-decorated artwork to cardboard CD sleeves using linoleum block printing. “We did it all ourselves by hand. I carved the linoleum,” says Chuck Whittington. “We painted and printed together. Each copy is absolutely unique. The CD version will have the same linoleum printing, but will not be painted. Again, each copy will be unique.”

A limited edition with one-of-a-kind artwork creates exclusivity and novelty, but that’s not the point here. It’s about savoring presentation and sensory experience before listening to the music itself. A cover makes a statement; it conveys attitude. Think Nirvana’s Nevermind, The Clash’s London Calling, Prince’s Purple Rain, U2’s War, N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton. MC Hammer's Too Legit to Quit. Just kidding with ol' MC, but the list of striking covers is endless. Even if a cover grabs attention, it doesn’t necessarily mean the recorded music is worth the price of ownership. Vice versa, crummy package design can obscure an artist’s dynamite songs.

With Wires Reply, the CD sleeve opens by lifting the tab and the play list (not found elsewhere) is on the inside cover. It might seem rudimentary, but it is rare to open a cool package created without digital graphics or produced en masse on a printing press. Knowing that the band made both the packaging and music builds anticipation. For the trio, getting the music out in any form was an arduous, time-consuming process.

Product
namelessnumberheadman, named after a character in Steven Soderbergh’s film Schizopolis, formed in 2000 and has served up four releases prior to Wires Reply, including the well-received Your Voice Repeating (2004) which earned rave reviews.

The band sought a label deal for major distribution of their latest work to no avail. “We searched actively for a label before work, during work, and after we finished Wires Reply,” says Whittington. “There were a few great labels that were interested up to a point, but they all passed for whatever reason, most didn’t say specifically why. As far as why, it’d only be speculation, but I can list off a couple of possibilities: We’re not trendy, we don’t tour (at least not often enough to say we do), and we sound too much like Grandaddy (which people say about us, but I just don’t understand how).”