I’ve just received my latest Care Package from ol’ pal Mark Weber, via the Zerx Records & Press faux-conglomerate deep down there in the 87108 zip code.
Yes, wittily stuffed inside his very latest chapbook split alongside jazz poet Gerald Locklin were the latest two installments of Mark’s greatest of so many inventions: Volumes 21 and 22 of the rightfully Zerx-famous albuZERXque compact compilations.
The ear truly boggles …particularly at the abundant sharp Dylan retreads spread across Number 22.
“Some people call these things samplers akin to them embroidery and needlework delicacies those dear 19th Century maidens stitched together,” Mark writes. “Just like that.” Yet they, like all 50-and-counting Zerx CD’s, are in fact limited editions of usually a hundred or so, each of which come in hand-printed linocut cardboard sleeves, “rather than computer-generated jewel case art.” It goes without saying, though I will anyways, that all us happily Lost in the Grooves can greatly appreciate this endearingly analog approach to the graphic end of business, no?
Meanwhile, whilst not trawling NM as if on behalf of some bizarro world Smithsonian Institute, and/or heading up his very own self-styled “prettified country band” The Bubbadinos (“Tenuousness, trepidation, drought, locust, musica antigua, cant & want, pock-marked chrome, lapsed backyard hallucinations, clippity-clop cowboys & indians, flat tires, cloven-hoofed, low odds, dice, subdural hematoma, jailhouse coffee, bellybutton lint” is how their most-aptly-titled The Band Only A Mother Could Love album has actually been described, I kid you knot), Mark can as well be seen curating his esteemed collection of modern age jazz photos over there at UCLA, can quite simultaneously be heard hosting Weber’s Weekly Worldwide Radioshow straight outta KUNM 89.9 Albuquerque, and somehow still finds some time to tell us all about it at the inimitable ZerxPressBlogSpot.
Head straight there immediately, won’t you all, to sample for yourselves some of the many munificent Zerx Leisure Products: “Roots Music from the Deep Southwest of the Mind,” “Home of The Bubbadinos and other world / class musicians and poets who happen to live in New Mexico or would like to or visited some time or ‘nuther.”
“Over 50 Records and Still Going Wrong !”