By BEN SISARIO


A few months ago a peculiar item called “Favorite Recorded Scream” began to trickle into New York City record stores. Pressed on 12-inch vinyl in an edition of 500, it has little on its red cover except a list of 74 songs, each linked to a Manhattan record shop.

The record is a catalog of scream snippets chosen by employees at record stores in Manhattan. It begins with the Pixies’ “Vamos” and includes samples of recordings by the Stooges, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, De La Soul, Slayer, Bjork and dozens of others. Spliced together on Side 1 into a continuous, bumpy howl, the whole thing lasts only 3 minutes 32 seconds.

Its creator is LeRoy Stevens, a 25-yearold artist who made the album both in homage to his creative hero, Ed Ruscha - whose 1963 book “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” is simply photographs of gas stations from California to Oklahoma - and as a more practical travelogue. Last fall Mr. Stevens moved to New York from Chicago, and to get his geographical bearings he plotted a map of every record shop in Manhattan and vowed to bring to each a questionnaire asking for every clerk’s favorite scream and why.

“For six months this is pretty much all I did,” Mr. Stevens said. “A lot of stores would say, ‘We like your project, but please come back another time.’”

The project also let Mr. Stevens explore a fascination with the scream as a musical element that is as ineffable as it is expressive. It first struck him while listening to “A Change Is Going to Come” by the 1960s soul singer Baby Huey. “It’s that point where it’s no longer about a word,” Mr. Stevens said. “It’s just an emotional release.”

Experienced as a piece of music, “Favorite Recorded Scream” offers a riveting if unsettling tour through decades of popular music. Buddy Holly’s carefree whoop in “Oh Boy!” goes right into James Brown’s sensual falsetto in “The Payback,” and the Swedish metal band Meshuggah is not far behind with the guttural cry of “I.”

On Side 2, the 74 screams are separated from one another by 10 seconds of silence. The record is for sale for about $15 at various stores in Manhattan; some also sell it by mail order through their Web sites, like Other Music (othermusic.com) and Turntable Lab (turntablelab.com).

The album has struck a chord with the collector cognoscenti in New York and beyond. The store Downtown 304 received orders from as far as Italy and China.

“It’s an underground hit on a global scale - or however much records can be a hit these days,” said Joe D’Espinosa, a coowner of the store.


Performers featured on LeRoy Stevens’s new LP, Favorite Recorded Scream, include the late James Brown.