About
It's near impossible to make any concrete generalizations about ART HURTS Records. With eleven CDs available and eight 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.
- Beston Barnett
Distribution
All ART HURTS CDs are available new here at ART HURTS online. The "world music" CDs (Da Rua Dos Ossos, Bolga Zohdoomah, and The Old Highlife) are also distributed all over the world by Stern's Music which means that they may or not be in stock at your local store, but they will almost certainly be in your local store's computer (ask for them!). Through our digital distributor The Orchard, all ART HURTS releases are available as downloads or subscriber streams at all major distributors (sites like iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc.).
Newsletter
ART HURTS sends out two separate email newletters.
The first is monthly and is meant for live music lovers living in Southern California; it lists local live performances in the coming month. Info about upcoming performances from ART HURTS artists is also updated regularly at the Calendar on this site.
The second newsletter contains info about new releases and is meant for anybody anywhere interested in ART HURTS Records. There's usually only two or three of these newsletters a year.
To join the newsletter, simply type in your email address, click where you live (So Cal or not...) and hit the "join" button in the upper right of this page. We take your privacy seriously, and will in no way compromise your email address.
Contact
ART HURTS Records
3020 Dale St.
San Diego, CA 92104
For inquiries about TV, movie, or advertising placements for anything in the ART HURTS catalog, please contact Tyler Bacon at Position Music.
Please do not send demos or press kits unless you are already familiar with ART HURTS work AND feel pretty certain your music fits snugly into the "world music" genre we usually promote.
To contact ART HURTS directly, please write to:
info (at) arthurtsrecords (dot) com
or through our MySpace page at