For years, I would attend the massive record fair in Utrecht. As Fall approached Winter, it always felt pretty good going to a rainy and windy Netherlands to fan the flame of record collecting to warm oneself up for the winter. I love the Utrecht record fair. It is a vibrant, global crazy place full of OCD, enthusiasm and ADD. Dealers from around the world meet collectors from around the world, and the interaction seems to be a lot more enthusiastic and a lot less snarky than what goes down on Ebay or Discogs. Every year, I’d high-tail it to the Mexican dealers’ table, and always ask for the same thing: records by Dangerous Rhythm. I can’t remember how I first found out about the band, but the description of the music as primitive garage punk with a Chain Gang/Pagans-esque flair was enough for my wallet to drool. One year, I acquired the Dangerous Rhythm 12″, another year the “Rock en El Chopo” compilation, and then finally, and nothing could really have prepared me for it, the shocking, illustrious, sublime ‘Stray Cat Blues’ 45. There are punk records, and there are punk records. Then there are those vinyl artifacts that people like Tesco Vee and Ryan Richardson have described as sacred objects outside of time and place. I feel that way about this 45. Like ‘Horizontal Action’ by The Psycho Surgeons, ‘To Find Out’ by The Keggs or ‘Agitated’ by The Electric Eels, this record is a work of art so pure, powerful, fucked up, crazed wild and sublime that I get that same electrical charge from the experience that I get from Jackson Pollock or Charley Patton or the lady of my heart. ‘Stray Cat Blues’ also happens to be a hellaciously rare record. A 1979 Mexican micro-pressing. Thank God it is now readily available in reality through the good folks at Munster! Johan Kugelberg