In Adam’s memory, Sumner’s life is divided into the pre-Sue and Sue eras, with Sue being Susan Lehman, aka Sue Crane, aka Aunt Sue to Adam and his sister. Sue came originally from California, moved around in her youth, wound up in New York by the mid-1980s, and met Sumner sometime around 1990, right when…

Cynthia Sobel, born Cynthia Schoenwetter, is Adam’s mother, and Sumner’s sister. So she knew Sumner from the very beginning of his life to the end, and there’s no one else alive who remembers the things about him that she does. She talks at length about their parents, Charles and Sylvia Schoenwetter, and their childhoods in…

As the front man in DNA, Arto Lindsay was one of the core No Wave figures from the start, and he and Sumner were good friends from the mid-1970s, when Arto arrived in NYC (along with Mark Cunningham and Connie Burg, from Eckerd College in Florida), into the 1980s and beyond. Arto played on Sumner’s…

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with painter David Reed. David’s paintings have been shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe from the 1970s to the present, in venues including the Guggenheim, Gagosian New York and Basel, Neues Museum Nürnberg, Häusler Contemporary, Zurich, and most recently at Galerie Nathalie…

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Lydia Lunch! Lydia is a singer, poet, writer, actress, and self-empowerment speaker. She got her start as the leader, singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, one of the four bands to appear on the compilation No New York, and moved on from…

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with photographer and graphic designer Julia Gorton about her experiences in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, and they share memories of Sumner. With Rick Brown, Julia produced the fanzine Beat It in the late 1970s, and that got her into shows free so that she could…

In this first proper episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Mark Cunningham, the bass player in Mars and one of two surviving members of the band. Mark also played brass instruments on John Gavanti, and that record was released on Mark’s own label, Hyrax. Mark has had a long career since then, with…

This episode launches a new series about the artist and musician Sumner Crane (1946-2003). Scientist Adam Sobel — Sumner’s nephew, and the host of this series as well as the podcast Deep Convection, out of which it grows — introduces the whole thing, explaining who Sumner was, why he (Adam) is doing this, and how…