It’s near impossible to make any concrete generalizations about ART HURTS Records. With fourteen CDs available and fourteen shaky years of business, it seems unlikely that we’ll be snatching fat market share from Warner Brothers anytime soon, but who knows? Esoterica, Acoustica, Africa, Nostalgica, and Cryptographica may well be the next big things. There is at least a feeling which connects all the ART HURTS music: you feel you are listening to music which is “rooted” but which is also “going somewhere”. This is music with eyes in the back of its head; music with a future and a past and a bridge to build in between. If that seems like a kind of aesthetic paradox, that’s OK because:
Art hurts.
Art and suffering walk hand in hand like butterfly wings and the pins we stick them with. Each artwork is a crystallization of some tiny aspect of the artist’s personality; the hurt – the pinprick – comes from 1) having to choose that part of your personality to be scrutinized, parable-ized, and crystallized, and 2) having to yank that little crystal out of your skull and leave it, fixed and unchanging, behind.
Because art hurts, we at ART HURTS Records do hereby solemnly swear to bring you pure crystals of the most deep funk, the most singing melody, and the most complex texture available in so far as our meager funds and living room studios allow.
Thanks and enjoy.