Ariel Pink
At long last, the L.A. musician goes crazy.
By Chris Ziegler
Photographed by Lindsey Byrnes
Ariel Pink is on the way to the bank -- literally, right this second, with his band's drummer, Aaron Sperske, who called him this morning to go cash checks. But hopefully in another sense, too.
It's been a long, strange trip for this Los Angeles kid who started writing music at age ten (and still remembers his first-ever song: "Sexy Lady"). He began winning fans and fanatics after Animal Collective debuted him on their Paw Tracks label in 2004, and then watched as devoted Ariel-ites like Girls and Kurt Vile roared forth with the kind of very respectable record deals that had never yet been offered to Mr. Ariel Pink.
For a while, he seemed destined for the sort of noble obscurity as the Monks, the Cleaners from Venus, Arthur Russell and Gary Wilson -- heroes to those who know, but unknown to just about everybody else. And then 4AD came calling.
Suddenly Ariel Pink and his band Haunted Graffiti were labelmates with icons like the Cocteau Twins, the Pixies and the Birthday Party. So much for going nowhere: "It was like, 'Aw, fuck -- this isn't supposed to happen. People like me aren't supposed to be discovered, they're supposed to rot and die miserable! Oh no!'" laughs Pink now. "What a kind of awful twist of fate that was! I guess I wasn't good enough not to be appreciated in my own lifetime."
For five years, Pink says, he had shut himself up -- just "biding his time" until he could get to a label that would get him in a proper studio, at which point he planned to "go crazy." 4AD was that label, and so Ariel Pink and Haunted Graffiti's brand new Before Today is a ferociously and formidably crazy album: sleaze and funk and neon and nuclear dread processed through Beefheart and Michael Jackson and Hall & Oates and Prince.
The band (Sperske, bassist Tim Koh and keyboardist Kenny Keys) sounds like they can handle anything from pop to punk to funk to post-punk clatter, and arcane production techniques supercharge the usual Pink-fi sound without trampling his trademark texture. There are synths and horns blooming like ink into water and enough special effects to carry a basic cable station from midnight to six in the morning -- telephone calls, tuff-guy spoken choruses, radio-dial chatter, Terry Riley melody clusters and back-up harmonies that perforate and blur and dissolve. And underneath everything are beautiful and sophisticated songs that connect at a molecular level to probably every great record of any genre released since 1956. It's nourishing in a way few albums are anymore.
"[Pink's] like Rain Man," laughs Sperske. "He hears it in his head as this fully figured-out piece, but he doesn't know where the pieces fit until we start playing with the puzzle."
And they might not even be pieces from the same puzzle. On Before Today, there are traces of early '80s radio, the bizarro synth riffs that soundtracked so much late-night TV of that era, the martial sci-fi cheese of the original Battlestar Galactica and the theme song of the movie E.T. It makes for something that would be completely schizophrenic -- if Pink didn't know exactly what he was doing.
As a kid, says Pink, he didn't understand that music was made by a bunch of musicians working together: "I didn't have any grasp of instrumentation," he says. "It was all just one giant jelly pump organ making the music and sort of flying in the clouds -- like one instrument playing everything. That's what I always try to go back to when I try to write. I want this sound that's all of that."
It's been a long, strange trip for this Los Angeles kid who started writing music at age ten (and still remembers his first-ever song: "Sexy Lady"). He began winning fans and fanatics after Animal Collective debuted him on their Paw Tracks label in 2004, and then watched as devoted Ariel-ites like Girls and Kurt Vile roared forth with the kind of very respectable record deals that had never yet been offered to Mr. Ariel Pink.
For a while, he seemed destined for the sort of noble obscurity as the Monks, the Cleaners from Venus, Arthur Russell and Gary Wilson -- heroes to those who know, but unknown to just about everybody else. And then 4AD came calling.
Suddenly Ariel Pink and his band Haunted Graffiti were labelmates with icons like the Cocteau Twins, the Pixies and the Birthday Party. So much for going nowhere: "It was like, 'Aw, fuck -- this isn't supposed to happen. People like me aren't supposed to be discovered, they're supposed to rot and die miserable! Oh no!'" laughs Pink now. "What a kind of awful twist of fate that was! I guess I wasn't good enough not to be appreciated in my own lifetime."
For five years, Pink says, he had shut himself up -- just "biding his time" until he could get to a label that would get him in a proper studio, at which point he planned to "go crazy." 4AD was that label, and so Ariel Pink and Haunted Graffiti's brand new Before Today is a ferociously and formidably crazy album: sleaze and funk and neon and nuclear dread processed through Beefheart and Michael Jackson and Hall & Oates and Prince.
The band (Sperske, bassist Tim Koh and keyboardist Kenny Keys) sounds like they can handle anything from pop to punk to funk to post-punk clatter, and arcane production techniques supercharge the usual Pink-fi sound without trampling his trademark texture. There are synths and horns blooming like ink into water and enough special effects to carry a basic cable station from midnight to six in the morning -- telephone calls, tuff-guy spoken choruses, radio-dial chatter, Terry Riley melody clusters and back-up harmonies that perforate and blur and dissolve. And underneath everything are beautiful and sophisticated songs that connect at a molecular level to probably every great record of any genre released since 1956. It's nourishing in a way few albums are anymore.
"[Pink's] like Rain Man," laughs Sperske. "He hears it in his head as this fully figured-out piece, but he doesn't know where the pieces fit until we start playing with the puzzle."
And they might not even be pieces from the same puzzle. On Before Today, there are traces of early '80s radio, the bizarro synth riffs that soundtracked so much late-night TV of that era, the martial sci-fi cheese of the original Battlestar Galactica and the theme song of the movie E.T. It makes for something that would be completely schizophrenic -- if Pink didn't know exactly what he was doing.
As a kid, says Pink, he didn't understand that music was made by a bunch of musicians working together: "I didn't have any grasp of instrumentation," he says. "It was all just one giant jelly pump organ making the music and sort of flying in the clouds -- like one instrument playing everything. That's what I always try to go back to when I try to write. I want this sound that's all of that."
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