Archive for the ‘Ariel Pink’ Category
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti-Artist Review
Paw Tracks, with its roster of Animal Collective, Black Dice, Panda Bear, and most important to me, Ariel Pink (the first non-Aminal Collective member), seems to be an excellent little label. The last on the list, Ariel Pink of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Grafiti, is one of the stand-out artists in contemporary music today, I would claim. I’m not sure how many of you are interested in “hauntology,” in whose precepts Pink is quite invested, but we’re all at least a little enamoured with the idea that society in late capitalism naturally gazes backwards to cobble newness together out of “traces” or “ghosts” of the past. Sounds intuitive enough, almost like a slogan for the general trend in music today, but Ariel Pink presses the point on its head by returning to 8-track cassette recording technology, cheap guitars and synthesizers, an extremely well-crafted lo-fi aesthetic in short.
Inevitably, listening to Ariel Pink is like finding a beaten old tape on the side of the road, whose name of the artist and of the songs are faded away. Popping it into your walkman leads you to think: yes, this is pop music; I’m not sure who it’s by, when it’s from, what it intends to achieve, but I’m intrigued.
Hailing from Los Angeles, a city knotted with innumerable ghosts, traces of dead stars, and containing film vaults that document the history of the rise and decline of American life and culture in the last eighty years, Ariel Pink expresses in “Life in L.A.” (included below for your listening pleasure) the loneliness of living in such a mausoleum, the experience of a “treasure” with “so many ways to unwind.” The reality of a life a debt, the reality of most people in our society, finds discussion in the tragicomic “Credit,” which begins with a hilarious skit involving a man who wants a refund boombox, and moves along, past an excellent phased chorus, to announce that “when you’re old, your kids will trade your brains for credit.”
Mr. Pink has innumerable underground releases, which do not include the nearly twenty albums to date (one of the most recent being The Glow In The Dark LP), and I, of course, have heard a slim margin of this vast collection of material (since I’m a fan, not a fanatic). The Doldrums is as good a place as any to begin, as I found, since it is a compendium of material from the late nineties to early 2000s, and because its low-grade electronic effects, tape hisses and vocal produce come together into an interesting melange, and even reminded some reviewers of Scott Walker (who is, as we know, can be just as weird if not weirder than the artist in question, known even to punch slabs of meat for percussive effect). His second major work, Worn Copy, however, happens to be my favourite album, the one I know best. Re-released in 2005 by Paw Tracks, it received wide critical reception and exposed Ariel Pink as an excellent songwriter capable of subverting pop music, and most important for me: capable of a fucking great hook (illustrated perfectly on “Immune to Emotion,” included below).
There are comparisons, of course, between Ariel Pink and other hauntologists, Mordant Music and The Caretaker, for instance, due to their treatment of nostalgia as a cultural symptom and a process of making music, but a cursory overview of these artists reveal both to be too electro/industrial to compare aesthetically. Rather, since Ariel Pink sounds to me like nothing I have heard before, the only logical equation, to me, is that he’s like Zappa: the intellectual bent, eccentricities, and warped “outsider” sensibilities suggest as much to me . . . And there you have it. That’s all I’ve got this week.
