Beset (Vinyl LP)

The Strange Girls once lived next door to me, or, more accurately, in front of me, as my house was on a rear section, up in Dunedin’s City Rise. This would have been somewhere around the turn of the millennium. At that stage I didn’t yet know of the band or their music; in fact I didn’t know them at all, being at that point in my life something of a murine recluse. No, what marked these neighbours most for me was the unique laugh of one of them. It was the most distinctive laugh I have ever heard, almost certainly the loudest. Like a tolling church bell, it would billow out over the entire neighbourhood, a ballooning cloud of murunga, a snowballing magic spell. I swear you would have been able to hear it in the next suburb. These guys seemed to spend a lot of time out in their backyard—every hour or two—and they laughed a lot, or this particular guy did, so it was a frequent and welcome blessing, this infectious gift to the world. For me in my lost state behind the untamed hedge it was soft rain from Ranginui. Honestly, I loved that guy before I’d even met him.

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