Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

Strange Fires

All eras considered, what can we say is the common thread behind
all the “best” rock and roll? It’s a spirit long considered dead that
somehow reignites and reclaims its sustenance through the amazing
inventions of those arrested by its truth.

- Ariel Pink, January 2005

It is striking how cautiously that Ariel Pink has described rock and roll in relation to it’s ‘spirit’. According to him, the spirit of rock and roll confounds its own apparent death through invention, but the phoenix-like re-emergence of it’s spirit takes place during a moment of disruption and ‘arrest’. The return of an authentic rock music is therefore not necessarily triumphant, and could even be destructive as it comes to ‘reclaim its sustenance.’ Ariel Pink’s use of the metaphor of fire to describe this moment is couched in mystery: it is a fire that ‘somehow reignites’, without warning or meaning. It’s possibilities are exciting but also daunting; a strange fire, at once capable of benign and malign forces, whose action can not be equated with natural reason but only with ‘spirit’.

The second track from Ariel Pink’s debut album for Paw Tracks, the record label set up by Animal Collective, is entitled ‘Strange Fires’. A swirling, opiated number that appears to be calling to us from across a vast expanse of time, it is both an ideal and incongruous example of the music on his Haunted Graffiti series of records, which are currently being reissued. The main riff of ‘Strange Fires’ also sounds like the recurring motif from the hugely successful early-nineties Gameboy game, Tetris. The memories it evokes are therefore simultaneously very old and quite new. Lyrically the song is barely audible beneath the haze of tape hiss, but the line, ‘Love may / turn into heartbreak’ flies unmistakeably from the bridge between verse and chorus. Such equivocal statements are typical of this artist.

Strange fires burn for the present world but also for the world that is to come. Ariel Pink confesses that when he was young, rock and roll had meant the world to him. It was the promise of something else, and in search of this something he collected records and hunted down information about musicians. ‘I’d research and listen to everything that even merely had a passing stint in the Rock n’ Roll Halls of Fame/Shame, which inspired my own musical pursuits.’ An obsessive taste for popular music had fired his dream of sound and had helped him to articulate himself musically. His love of this kind of music, which dates from the 1960s to the present day, and includes almost every type of popular song that the West has produced, has been described as a religious love. His lyrics often tremble with uneasy statements of his admiration. In the song ‘Hardcore Pops Are Fun’, he exclaims: ‘Pop music’s your wife, / have it for life. / Pop music is wine, / it tastes so divine.’ The intensity of feeling is expressed in an almost esoteric language: pop music as wife/wine, tasting divine. The sentiment strays so far from recognised norms of lyrical expression that it is unclear whether he is blowing kisses to or throwing rocks at the music that he claims to love.

Perhaps that is the intention, for Ariel Pink’s love of pop music is not a pure and blissful love. No more profound sense of contentment emerges from his work than from the work of his predecessors. Instead, the love that grows out of his early interest in pop music is obsessive, and like all obsessive loves it estranges the lover from the object of his longing. This is not to say that the lover parts company with his beloved, but rather that love intensifies as the beloved appears more distant to him – intensifies and becomes something else. In ‘Loverboy’ he sings: ‘Lovergirl, / I love you like an animal. / I love you like a / dog or a snake or a mouse or a cat.’ The intensity of longing transforms the appearance of the beloved not once but again and again, into a series of animal images.

In a similar way, by mimicking older forms of pop music Ariel Pink’s songs are perverted by his obsession with their influences. The tension between his fidelity to their ‘spirit’ and his mistrust of the present day – a mistrust that must extend to himself – expresses itself in the form of interruptions and delays to the progress of the songs. Nothing is allowed to pass unexamined, and consequently everything is mediated by his own ambiguity about its meaning. This impatience with the accepted state of things extends even beyond the world of music: he has stated for example how in his love for his home town of Beverly Hills he would like to pervert the city into its hidden, true form: ‘I’d like to see every crackpot, squatter, gutterpunk, columbine kid in town set up tent in everybody’s lawn and party 24hrs a day. I want it to look on the outside the way it really is from within…They should hold Bar Mitzvah receptions at the BH County Jail. Mr. Chows catering szechuan pork dumplings. Axl Foley anyone?’


Artefact

You’ve lost what you never knew you had.

- Ariel Pink, ‘Artefact’

It has often been remarked that Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti consists of music that sounds as if it has been discovered from the past, like the aural equivalent of buried treasure. Considering the subject matter of his songs – loss, nostalgia, memory – the statement seems appropriate. Yet this image is distorting, for no other contemporary pop music is so unmistakeably a product of the present day. Ariel Pink describes his wish ‘to make the saddest music that ever was,’ adding that, ‘the pop quality in my music is so sad because it’s nostalgic – it is the sound of a happiness that’s not there anymore.’ Rather than playing host to nostalgia through his music, he bears witness to its effect on culture. Nothing in Haunted Graffiti is meant to remind listeners of an actually existing past.

The Haunted Graffiti material are a series of reissues: historical artefacts that have been given a second release. Ariel Pink began recording songs in 1995. He describes it as ‘a long learning process, caught on tape.’ He thinks up melodies which he learns to remember, and then records these on his home stereo cassette deck. Rather than grumbling about the subsequent fuzzy quality of the sound production, he affirms it, claiming that ‘I write music that I believe was meant to be realized on this particular machine, namely my MT8X Yamaha cassette 8 track recorder.’

Once a song is recorded it does not mark the end of the process of its coming to light: ‘I tinker constantly with old songs giving them makeovers constantly…I listen back and make follow-up mixes, sometimes as many as ten per song.’ Each song is replayed and dissected, reimagined and recomposed, each version adding a layer of his own time spent in its company into the mix. The distance that he acquires from his music as a result of this process is unimaginable, a distance moreover which strengthens rather than diminishes his hold over the material. The Doldrums was mostly recorded while he was finishing his last semester at California Institute of Arts, in December 1999 – April 2000. He claims that, ‘I couldn’t make the Doldrums today, even if I tried.’ Around 200 tapes remain unreleased in his apartment, products of that time of feverish activity. ‘Most of them are completed albums or master tapes with about 20 minutes of music on each.’

The effects of repeated taping and alteration are everywhere to be found in his songs. In ‘Young pilot astray’ the second chorus is brought into the verse by cutting abruptly from a bar in the preceding verse. In the context of that song it makes melodic sense. Many of the songs are similarly brought into clarity by cutting and splicing different sections together. The chorus of ‘Life in LA’ is brought in a moment sooner than anticipated by shifting the recording amplitude, heightening the intensity of the lyric amid the tired, sighing horns: ‘It can be so lonely. / Life in LA, / can be lonely.’

Given this emphasis on the warping of sound in his songs, it is important to distinguish between two types of distortion in Haunted Graffiti. Firstly, there is the distortion that is inevitable given the limited sound quality of the equipment used. Secondly, there is the distortion that results from the various audio techniques that Ariel Pink uses, to which the limited quality of the equipment has an added but indirect effect. In ‘Didn’t it click?’ there is a continuous and indefinable whirling sound that acts as the disorienting backdrop to the entire song. The distorted haze in ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ and ‘Good kids make bad grown ups’ disrupts and disorders the flow of these otherwise straightforward pop-rock numbers. Critics have claimed that Ariel Pink has thus ruined his perfectly good songs. The problem for these listeners is that Haunted Graffiti lacks clarity of focus, or to put it another way, the musicianship whose visual complement is the picturesque. Criticism that is based on the desire for better production misses the point of these songs, for such a move would only erase the abrasions and flatten the condensations of time that Ariel Pink raises above the smooth sheen of ‘good production’.

What the Haunted Graffiti series does is to make us think about music differently. Something in the songs is ruined, parasitical, but no less listenable as a form of pop music. Ariel Pink ruins his songs by alternating between melodies and cutting them into each other at unexpected moments, overlaying them in a haze of distortion produced by multiple takes and edits. Consequently there is often the appearance of two distinct melodies within the same song, each seemingly hidden to the other. He has observed in this trace effect of competing sounds ‘an objective quality that lives outside of time and reality.’ Because it is inexpressive of a culture or a history, the trace is untroubled by the things in which they have invested themselves.

The Haunted Graffiti material therefore seems entirely absent from history; yet the period of its production is quite specific. Clearly Ariel Pink believes that he was in the grip of something during the turn of the Millenium, and he is hesitant to declare whether it might return at some point in the future. In the annals of rock and roll these experiences are not uncommon, indeed they form the impetus behind a lot of radical music. However, Ariel Pink’s claim to history goes a little deeper than that. He is not merely concerned with expressing sadness, or even with articulating the return of the ‘spirit’ of rock and roll. Such excesses continue to be produced elsewhere in the mainstream with sterile frequency, and have a tendency to wear listeners out. But it is precisely in their worn quality that Ariel Pink has discovered a different experience of pop music.

Nothing is more apt than that a son of Los Angeles, the city of memory loss, should produce a body of work that feeds on this loss. Nostalgia, forgetting, and the memory industry that is represented by Hollywood itself ruins and lays waste to its cultural objects through endless repetition. Far from occupying the position of an avant-garde iconoclast, however, Ariel Pink’s work places him at the centre of this industry. He is an experimental artist only insofar as this describes his own sense of disorder amid the strange fires inaugurating the return of the ‘spirit’ of rock and roll. In approaching these fires time and again during the production of Haunted Graffiti, he has progressively ruined his songs. But things which are in ruin are also by their natures undergoing transformation; decay and decomposition are signs of life at the extremes of existence. It is our predicament that we should be able to appreciate only this, and not the disordering fires.


References

John Albert, ‘Lost and Found’, LA Weekly, December 2-8, 2005

Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (2001)

Jay, ‘Who said anything about pop music?’, www.tinymixtapes.com, January 2005

Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997)

Simon Reynolds, ‘Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: House Arrest’, The Observer 22/01/2006

Ross Simonini, ‘It’s so lonely that way’, www.identitytheory.com, 13/01/2006