Mar 12, 2011 Cross Country Connections

This world of hardcore music and collecting feels so small now a days. But it's not. It's actually bigger than it's ever been. When people talk about collecting and hardcore they usually break it up into two specific time periods. Before the internet, and after the internet. But I think there's a 3rd time period. This 3rd period consists of social netwroks, blogs, ecommerce sites, etc. I only think this started happening about 5 or 6 years ago though. Right now, between Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Big Cartel, Limited Pressing, Bandcamp, etc Anyone can start a label, anyone can find music they like, and anyone can have some out of control weird connection to someone 3000 miles away.

Lets switch gears, a blog that I think anyone who's reading this knows about is Stuck In The Past. A bunch of great guys run that site. Including one Justin Sitner, singer of a band named Unrestrained. Now a while back Justin did a post about Sons of Abraham and included a lot of info about my blog. And ever since that post, Justin and I have been buddies. We talk often about records and the 90s, and when I launched Limited Pressing, Unrestrained was one of our first stores. Now here's where it starts to get interesting. Last year my brother Tom emailed me and said his friend from high School, Brendan, was in a band called Incendiary. And he also said they sounded really good. He sent me a link and 10 minutes later we were preordering their first full length. I'll get back to Incendiary again in a minute...

After LP started to take off a little bit, we helped out a few other people connected to Stuck In The Past. One person was Chris Weinblad, AKA Trip Machine Labs Which is a label located here in NY. They've put out a bunch of nice releases from bands like With Honor, All Out War, and a band with the coolest name ever Atlas Shrugged. Trip Machine is also releasing the Most Precious Blood demo on vinyl soon. He also recommended that MPB get a store with LP. That was a really cool day when I saw that sign up email come in.

As I was saying earlier, anyone can have some out of control weird connection to someone 3000 miles away. Well here's my connection. A few months back Justin informed via email about a split 7" Unrestrained was going to be doing with a Long Island band. That band's name? Incendiary! And you know what label it was coming out on? Trip Machine Labs. I couldn't believe it! What are the chances?

Well the record release for the 7" was last weekend and Trip Machine had a little surprise for Long Islanders. A special #ed version for the bands to sell at their release shows. Unfortunately LP has me so busy these days, I haven't been out of the house for anything social in who knows how long. And it's about to get worse cause Tom and I are starting a few more companies/sites this year. Well seeing as I had no time to go to Incendiary's show, which was only like 30 minutes from my damn house, I had to enlist the help of my friend Dan Sterling. Sick twitter username man. Dan and I had to meet up to make a deal for some shirts, so I asked him to grab a copy of the release version for me. And Dan came through!

That surprise I was talking about? Check that cover out!


VOD s/t, or as my 90s friends and I called it when it came out, The Green Spooge cover.

#ed out of 70. Great amount I think. Especially for a split. These will be spread out across the country. And it'll be an extremely desirable record, especially after Incendiary's next full length, which I suspect will be on a prominent hardcore label.

Got a couple of shirts I want to post about soon. Maybe I can do one this week.