The 2024 Eccentric Bundle Part 1

Bundle featuring the compilations from The Shoestring Labels, The Saadia Label, and Tragar & Note Labels  On March 1, 2004, Numero issued the first volume of our long-running Eccentric Soul series. The Capsoul Label was our first foray into the world of regional soul music, and over the next twenty years we issued nearly two dozen volumes, documenting such far ranging locales as Wichita, Kansas, San Antonia, Texas, and Norfolk, Virginia, and labels named Deep City, Twinight, and Way Out. These parallel soul universes were filled with endless replication: the Berry Gordy phenotype, the James Brown archetype, the Temptations chromosome, copied and mimicked and mutated into a thousand forms. When a true hit made its big splash, Eccentric Soul was that very last ripple. Operating in a basement studio at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, pipeline man Howard Neal and his appropriately named Shoestring label was Alton, Illinois’ answer to a question no one asked. Pres