Hollertronix Vol. 8 - "Welcome To Hell" (Mad Decent, 2008)

Well, this is my last post here. I wanted to find something Christmassy but I guess I don't own any holiday music. I blame working in retail stores over the holidays for this gap in the collection. Anyhow, I thought I'd close it out with a touch of Satan instead. Thanks Alexander for letting me guest blog over here for a couple weeks. I thought that by going through all of my vinyl to look at the labels I would start to weed out the stinkers. But hey, go figure, I love those stinkers! Happy Axe-mas to all!

Pizzicato Five - "Happy End of the World" (Matador, 1997)

happy!

Nervous Records

I love the Nervous Records label. It's a very hard, dirty house label out of New York. There are more imprints then Nervous Dog Records (Wreck Records and Weeded Records) but each of them have the cartoon head. So awesome.

Cold Mountain Music / Sufi Islamia Ruhaniat Society (1975)

I appreciate that this record puts the Sufi dance before the song, but I think the vibe is a bit hard to capture on vinyl. There's a bunch of chanting of mantras and the like that you can hear, but it doesn't quite capture the hypnotic visual of the circular trance-like whirling (see this short clip from the film Decasia for a sense of what I'm talking about). The label here tries to do some of this work, but the first time I pulled this one out of the sleeve I mistook these two whitey dervishes as being awkward sleepers. I wonder if that's partly because whoever designed this didn't bother to trim out the space between them. Also, where the heck did their other feet go? I guess they can just kinda plant with the stump and then twirl.

Indian Records (1972)

One of my earlier memories is of being mesmerized by the dances and songs of some sort of Native American advocacy group who visited my elementary school in Colorado Springs, so I was excited to find this LP years later at Wax Trax in Denver. I love the tall skinny Indian Records font, and how about these drawings! What I wouldn't give to strut and dance atop a human-sized vinyl platter. Side 1 of this LP is all War Dance Songs. Me, I'm more of a Social Dancer.

(Note: I had a difficult time finding any information about this record including its year of release, but I eventually found it listed as a cassette in this article on the recordings of Plains Indians. )