Hardship Like A Fortune
(Chocolate Monk - choc.421) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two of northern England’s finest purveyors of head scratch, Joe Murray and Sturat Arnot, get together for some real wild brut stylings. Do the avant hunch. “We’re outsiders here, unworthy uitlanders, carbuncles even,” they admit, “We’re intruders on, about, over and in this Novocastrian soil. One of us is, at least, perseverant; of three decades standing, a good chunk of anyone’s life, worthy of some sort of respect, perverse though it may seem, but the other is painfully unripe, fresh off the boat, all flapping gills and shivering and shriveling innards. Brazenly, we attempt to appease the local wigs by paying homage as best we can to their rituals, even as we fail to read the native semiotics: we drink ourselves the wrong red and, betweeded and sweating, bray loudly but unconvincingly these half-thought half-songs, misbegotten paeans to their heroic generations; we fall out, trip and fall out onto the moor and down, through the town to the Tyne, garbed suddenly, sullenly and awkwardly in unseemly black, where we desperately expose the ferrous ribbons of our tattered fake books to the corrosive, salty sweep of the northerlies and wail.” Numbered edition of 60