Turntabling On Tour

Whenever it’s time to load up the vehicle with eight or nine hundred vinyl records, rare CDs and other stuff for sale in the Turntabling booth, I always hear the strains of ‘The Tubes World Tour”. And it’s that time again.

Three shows in March make this a quite busy season–things start with Days of the Dead in Atlanta March 9-11, then it’s Horrorhound Weekend in Columbus March 23-25, and finally at the end of the month Turntabling appears at Cinema Wasteland which always happens in Strongsville, Ohio.

The Atlanta show is truly the farthest Turntabling has ever gone to sell vinyl–13 hours of driving for the one-weekend event is pretty ambitious but you never know how these things will go. If it goes well, it could be a repeat visit for us in years to come.

If you’ve never seen the Turntabling booth at a horror convention or film festival, you’re in for a vinyl-collecting treat. Five or six crates packed full of rare, hard-to-find and just plain awesome records, plus a ton of rare CDs…our selection personally curated and is aimed at the discriminating vinyl junkie looking for things you might be hard pressed to discover elsewhere.

Turntabling sells and collects rare soundtrack sounds (Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Goblin, Gert Wilden, Piero Umiliani, Harry Manfredini, John Carpenter, you name it) vintage 80s industrial/dark music (Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, Skinny Puppy, Sleep Chamber, Hilt, Legendary Pink Dots, Coil, Test Department, etc), post-punk (PiL, Gang of Four, Pop Group, Shriekback,) and sonic oddities which must be seen to be believed (Leonard Nimoy reading Ray Bradbury, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi doing horror radio theater, Vincent Price readings, Doctor Who vinyl, etc.)

If you are planning to come to any of the next three events, and want to sell vinyl please get in touch with us at the show or via our comments section–we can’t purchase everything but always give at least some a look and a fair price when there are titles we need. If you wonder what we are in the habit of purchasing, just look at the site and you’ll get a very good idea indeed.

We hope to see you at the shows! In the meantime, here’s a video version of The Tubes World Tour, because it’s our road tripping theme song.

–Joe Wallace

The Turntabling Collection: Latest Vinyl Titles for Sale

The Turntabling Collection is our ever-growing curated vinyl record collection–some of which goes up for sale to finance the site and help our fellow vinyl junkies fill holes in their collections. Here’s the latest, and don’t forget that every time you buy vinyl from The Turntabling Collection, you’re not just buying rare, hard-to-find, or just plain cool vinyl records and CDs–you’re also helping to keep Turntabling alive and kicking. Thank you for your continued support!

Various – Aquarius Rock: The Hip Reggae World Of Herman Chin-Loy (Double vinyl LP)

A double LP compilation of reggae sounds including Augustus Pablo, Herman, The Aquarians, and many  others. There’s a definite obsession with dub and reggae round the Turntabling office and this record is two slabs of awesome.

Sound Dimension Mojo Rocksteady Beat (Double vinyl LP)

Soul Jazz presents Sound Dimension doing two albums worth of rock steady reggae. If you know Soul Jazz, chances are good that you’d be willing to take a chance on this unheard and unseen–as we did. The Sound Dimension are described as the overseas equivalent to Booker T and the MGs or The Funk Brothers–they did the same kind of daily grind studio session work. Hear them in top form here…

Billion Dollar Brain Original Soundtrack Vinyl LP

Richard Rodney Bennett’s soundtrack for the Michael Caine spy thriller. Some people are completely into this soundtrack, while others are completely unaware of it. It’s a bit overly symphonic in places, but the tracks Anya and Love Scene are Morricone-esque enough to get the attention of Maestro fans, and that’s good enough for us! Nice stuff indeed.

Francesco De Masi Inglorious Bastards Soundtrack Vinyl LP (Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato)

This is NOT the soundtrack for the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds. Instead, what we have here is a sealed, new reissue on Get Back Records of the ORIGINAL movie Inglorious Bastards, directed by Enzo Castellari, with soundtrack music by Francesco De Masi. Italian soundtrack lovers, here’s a treat for you!

Again, when you buy from The Turntabling Collection, you’re supporting the site directly, so thank you for choosing Turntabling. There is much more to choose from, these are just some of the latest additions.

Vinyl Records For Sale From the Turntabling Collection

The Turntabling Collection is a group of nearly 1,000 rare records, hard-to-find vinyl LPs, and interesting records curated by Turntabling.net and yours truly. I sell titles from this ever-growing collection to fund Turntabling and to raise money for Vinyl Road Rage excursions across the USA.

The collection was offline for the holidays and a heavy touring season (Turntabling.net sells at horror/sci-fi conventions and film festivals) but there is an ever-growing select group of unique, rare, and hard to find vinyl & CDs available for sale once more.

The latest titles include, but aren’t limited to, some of these awesome records:

Public Image Limited, The Flowers Of Romance

A great, memorable vinyl LP from the voice of the Sex Pistols, John Lydon. This is a 180-gram vinyl reissue on 4 Men With Beards and is a truly stunning record. Upon hearing this, some find it hard to believe Never Mind The Bollocks and The Flowers of Romance have the same brain in common.

Gershon Kinglsey, Music To Moog By

Gershon Kingsley, half of the awesome experimental Moog duo Perry & Kingsley, shows off his stuff solo on this excellent reissue on Dagored Records. Dagored always does an outstanding job on these reissues and this one is getting harder to find all the time. A must-have for Moog lovers.

Demon, British Standard Approved

Here’s a band that started off as what some describe as “Brit biker metal”, but the band took a few side journeys along the way. This record shows the band starting to experiment with other sounds. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground with this record, some say it’s a love-it-or-hate-it affair.

Riz Ortolani, Mondo Candido

Ortolani is legendary as the man behind the creepy and sometimes sentimental sounds of the infamous Italian gut-muncher Cannibal Holocaust. He is definitely one of the all-time great Italian soundtrack masters for genre films like this–essential listening! Another amazing 180-gram vinyl reissue from Dagored Records in Italy.

You’ll find all this and more in the Turntabling Collection, on sale and frequently updated at the Turntabling shop at Discogs.com.

Turntabling Appearances Up Next: Flint Horror Con 2011 Flint, Michigan

Turntabling brings the vinyl to the Flint Horror Con in Flint Michigan on Saturday October 29, 2011. If you haven’t seen the Turntabling Collection at Horrorhound Weekend, Cinema Wasteland, Dark Carnival Film Fest or Horror Society events, now’s your chance to get a load of the rare, obscure, lustworthy and hard-to-find vinyl records and CDs that make up the Turntabling Collection.

At this one-day horror festival, Turntabling will have all sorts of vinyl and CD insanity including out-of-print titles by Goblin, John Carpenter, Skinny Puppy, Coil, Legendary Pink Dots, Demon, and many many others. You’ll find plenty of great stuff to pore over at the Turntabling booth and the many other vendors at the show.

This is the very first horror con in Flint according to the ads, and the response to the show has been really amazing–so much so that the film festival itself had to close the submissions down because so many entries had come in.

If you live near the show, come by and say hello–we’d love to see you at the Flint Horror Con! It”s at the Masonic Temple at 755 S, Saginaw Street in Flint, MI. Join us! Doors open at noon.

The Turntabling Collection

Now that we’re back from Cinema Wasteland, the Turntabling Collection inventory has been updated (a big job, thanks to the awesome vinyl lovers at Wasteland picking up loads of rare and hard to find vinyl) and is now back on line for your viewing pleasure.

The Turntabling Collection is made of hundreds of CD and LP titles that are, as mentioned above, rare and hard to find or just plain cool. Everyone who purchases from Turntabling is making a direct show of support for the site since all proceeds go to keep the site going.

Your support is GREATLY appreciated. Thanks to all who came to see The Turntabling Collection at Cinema Wasteland this weekend and we look forward to seeing you again at the next show. An updated appearance schedule will be posted shortly.

Browse the Turntabling Collection.

Updated Turntabling Appearance Schedule

In addition to selling vinyl online in places like the Turntabling Discogs.com store and similar ventures, this site hits the road every year to do horror and sci-fi conventions. Last week I posted a schedule for the upcoming madness, but since then I’ve had an addition and possibly more to come.

I’ll have more vinyl-and more RARE vinyl-at the following shows than ever before. Not sure how I’m going to fit it all into one little convention table space, but there will definitely be a lot to choose from including rare horror soundtracks like Halloween 2, Return of the Living Dead and the like, plus some ultra-rare stuff from the sci-fi side of things like the Dark Star soundtrack, Tom Baker reading Jules Verne, Leonard Nimoy reading Bradbury on vinyl and much more.

Here is the latest schedule current til the end of the year–these are all shows where you will find the Turntabling table and lots of great vinyl records:

Flashback Weekend, August 12-14 2011 in Rosemont, Illinois. It’s located at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O’Hare at 5440 River Road.

Cinema Wasteland, September 30 – October 2 2011 in Strongsville Ohio. It’s at the Holiday Inn at 15471 Royalton Road in Strongsville.

Dark Carnival Film Festival, October 21-23 2011 in Bloomington, Indiana. For ticket and location info call (812) 323-3020

Horrorhound Weekend November 11-13 2011 in Cincinnati Ohio. This one is at the Crowne Plaza Hotel 11320 Chester Road.

If there are additional updates, I’ll post a revised schedule soonest. Hope to see you at one or more of these shows!

–Joe Wallace

Kerry Livgren Seeds of Change Vinyl LP

by Joe Wallace

Kerry Livgren is best known for his guitar mania in Kansas. Classically influenced, sort of residing in the same musical zip code as Yes, but without the capes, the frilly raised pinky finger playing, and near-falsetto whine vocals.

Livrgren’s solo record, Seeds Of Change, has a trippy backstory. Livgren had experienced a lot of existential crises while on the rise in Kansas. He was well into something called The Urantia Book, which was one of those dusty old tomes supposedly dictated by “celestial beings” and full of revelations about life, the universe, and everything.

Livgren went evangelical after his conversations with a member of his support band, Le Roux. “I began to get more agitated and emotionally upset than ever. It was as though a thousand pounds was weighing down on my shoulders. I knew I was heading toward a significant conclusion, but I didn’t know what it would be.”

He had one of those quintessentially late 70s/early 80s born-again experiences and decided to chuck the Urantia book and dive into Jesus instead.

Livgren is probably one of the least tiresome “true believers” who kept going with music. Smart enough to know when to save it for Sunday and skilled enough in the music biz to let his views influence his work but not completely devour it, it turned out to still be possible to listen to an 80s-era Kansas record without feeling like you were being dragged in front of a Jimmy Swaggart revival meeting.

So when Livgren came out with this solo album, Seeds of Change, it could have gone one of two ways–the grim, humorless fist of churchy preach-a-tization, or a more complex, multi-layered artistic endeavor.

He chose the latter, even if the record is overwhelmingly evangelical in content. Some of which you have to be savvy enough to read between the lines to get (Ground Zero) plus some decidedly blatantly in-your-face-for-God material (Mask of the Great Deceiver).

The thing that makes this record truly wonderful? A must-buy? Two things, actually. It is a stunning artifact of 70s cheese–the prog-a-licious synths of the futuristic Ground Zero are too fun to pass up, and ditto for the Broadway-style musical intro to Mask of the Great Deceiver. Listening to that, you can just picture some kind of demented chorus line forming.

Secondly, the guest vocals on this album are a complete shock. Livgren may have converted to evangelical Christianity, but he did NOT lose his sense of humor for this album–Mask of the Great Deceiver features lead vocals by none other than old hook-em-horns himself, Ronnie James Dio.

Who, I might add, did NOT phone it in. AND, oddly enough, performed without a shred of irony while singing lyrics in praise of God and warning about the DEVILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL.

Livgren put Dio on two tracks, saying he wanted to give Dio a chance to do something “diametrically opposed” to the Black Sabbath and solo stuff. But you can’t help but think it was also a tweak at the stuffy, uptight brethren he surely found himself dealing with once his conversion story got out.

All that said, there are some completely insufferable moments on this album. The first cut, “Just One Way” is a shameless Christian tract basically saying what the title implies. Livgren may be one of the most creative forces in Christendom, but he was still infected with that religious elitism that plagues all the monotheists–”Our god is NUMBER ONE! YEAH!”

But the good stuff on this album is worth repeated listens, even the instrumental break on the gag-tacular “Just One Way” is pretty great. Try to ignore the naivete at work on the moments where “God Is Great, God Is Good, And He’s The Only Thing That Will Make You Happy” noises are happening, cuz Seeds of Change by Kerry Livgren is a lot of fun otherwise.

(Transparency alert: at the time of this writing I have a copy of Seeds of Change for sale at Discogs.com. If you click on the links and find it’s not there anymore, you can always check out the other rare, strange, and under-appreciated vinyl I have for sale there.)

–Joe Wallace

The Turntabling Podcast

www.turntabling.net

(Click the image to play or see the link below)

The very first Turntabling Podcast is now up and running for your listening enjoyment. First episodes of ANYTHING are painful, rough, cheesy and difficult to be enthusiastic about once the next and much-better-sounding editions go up, but for now this maiden voyage of the Turntabling Podcast will have to do.

The idea behind this show is not so much to do music CRITICISM, but something more along the lines of vinyl ARCHAEOLOGY. Consider this a voyage into the dark, scary underbrush of vinyl. Where the monsters live, at least according to local superstition.

In this first episode, Turntabling discusses born again christian new-wave music by Steve Taylor, an Australian experimental album called Tape Projects 06, the frightening and funny Hilarity And Despair: American Answering Machine Tapes Volume One, plus a listen to choice bits off the Irritainment album by Guyana Punch Line. Sore throat music isn’t for EVERYONE, but some people like it.

Listen to the first-ever Turntabling Podcast, and remember that just like Dan Savage would say…it gets better. Episode Two should be FAR more entertaining, but don’t let my saying that deter you from hearing these weird vinyl cuts…they’re worth it.

–Joe Wallace