Spark Of Influence

Last year, I was crushing pretty hard on 90's Hardcore. I spent a lot of time stuck in daily playlists from that era, and found myself obsessively hunting down records that I thought I'd lost passion for long ago. One of those bands was Sparkmarker. It had been a while since I'd really spent any time with them, and revisiting their discography had me head over heals and hunting down pieces of vinyl that were missing from my collection.

I posted about it at the time, and it created a kind of Butterfly Effect that carried it's way across the Atlantic, influencing Marcus to dust off the Sparkmarker catalog, and buy a piece of vinyl that he had been missing.

And that influence comes full circle, as his blog post sparked me (excuse the pun) to chase the vinyl that he recently picked up.

When I was picking off Sparkmarker targets last year, I decided not to mess around with their split with Mystery Machine. I ignored it for two reasons. First, the Sparkmarker song on this split, Keep The Quarter, shows up later on the band's full length record...and second, I'd never even heard of Mystery Machine before, so who gives a fuck about their song?

Still, Marcus made a point of saying that he'd never even seen the blue vinyl pressing before, and that they didn't seem to come around too often, and of course now that he had one, two more were available on Discogs. I took the bait, and 5 minutes later, there was only one left on Discogs. I'm not going to be left out like a sucker.

Not to let Marcus get one up on me in the Sparkmarker game, I had to grab the clear vinyl pressing as well. It only cost me $3.50, so why not. So within the span of 10 minutes, I'd gone from not caring the least about the Sparkmarker/Mystery Machine split, to owning two copies.

The recording for Keep The Quarter here was done a few months prior to the LP, and this version sounds really cool with the more raw production...and surprisingly, the Mystery Machine song here does not suck. I'm not sure if I'd be interested in hanging with them for a full length, but I dig this song.

Okay, now that I had every 7 inch pressed for Sparkmarker, the only hole in my collection was the 500wattburner@seven LP...and for less than $10, I was able to cross that one off the list.

I was kind of surprised that this was such a cheap find. Sure, I would expect Sparkmarker vinyl to fly under the radar these days...but colored vinyl...from Revelation's weird cousin, Crisis Records? I thought it would still take a bit more effort than that.