Ariel Pink Talks Early Recordings, Ariel Archives, New Music, and More
Ariel Archives is one of the most significant undertakings to occur this year not only in our sphere at Weirdo Music Forever, but also in that of experimental pop music as a whole. The project (released via Mexican Summer) was described in its PR launch as “a comprehensive series of reissues and retrospective collections concentrating on the material recorded and released by Ariel Pink as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti”. Bold a promise as that may be, WMF can confirm after receiving the three initial vinyl 12-inches from the ongoing series that it is one which the archival project indeed delivers. Equally rewarding as it is ambitious, this thoughtful re-release will indubitably not only please Pink’s well-established international following by offering a richer experience of his past material, but also afford new fans the opportunity to experience his body of work presented in a way much closer to how it was first conceived by Ariel Pink than ever heard before.
For importantly, through the painstaking process of locating, organizing, and working directly from source recordings, the Ariel Archives project yields something far more valuable than mere re-packaged compilations. Rather, the archival series offers unprecedented, higher-quality remixed recordings that are a notably more accurate reflection of Ariel Pink’s original intent than any iteration hitherto available to the public. Eager to obtain first-hand info from both Ariel Pink and recording engineer/musician/archivist Paul Millar about the exciting archival undertaking, we gratefully jumped at the opportunity to discuss the impetus behind Ariel Archives, gain insight into some of the technical challenges and achievements related to the historic re-release, see the source cassette tapes, and more.
Bobby Weirdo: How does it feel be archiving your work like this? You seem young to be archiving.
Ariel Pink: I don’t feel young. I figure this is a good spot to re-release this stuff, because it’s the twentieth anniversary since I was twenty years old. I wrote The Doldrums when I was twenty, so it’s perfectly poised and more or less a middle-of-the-career kind of thing. I don’t know if there’s ever going to be another re-issue or archives kind of thing happening, so I’m happy that these get a new release and from now on I won’t have to lug around Paw Tracks copies with me to sell at live shows.
BW: You mention Paw Tracks, and I wanted to go back to the origin of that connection to the label and Animal Collective. Was Jimi Hey responsible for the connection by passing along your early recordings to them?
AP: No – Jimi Hey is the person who turned me on to Animal Collective. He told me who they were, I went to their show, and I gave them the materials. I think they already had an established friendship with Jimi Hey, so maybe that’s where the confusion was.
BW: Your drive seems exceptional during that time. What connection do you feel to that twenty-year-old who wanted his music heard? Is the person who has that drive to get his music out into the world still in you?
AP: I don’t know if it was drive; that wasn’t really what it was. I would make personal copies – CD-Rs and cassette tapes – of whatever I was working on, and then I would pass them out to whoever I thought would like them or if I liked what somebody did, I would give them to [those people]. I kept it pretty selective in terms of who I would give them to – I wasn’t just going to shows all the time and passing them to anyone in earshot. There was no drive there – it was just serendipity.
I had no idea [Animal Collective] had a label. I wouldn’t give a band a CD-R and think that they had [their own] label. It was just good fortune, I suppose.
BW: So it was almost just like Jerry Solomon – you were distributing your music to people you thought might like it.
AP: Yeah, in the early days I used to dub off ten copies or something, hand-make the covers myself, and I’d walk into a record store and slip it into the bins as if it was being sold there. I’d never follow-up on it or anything like that – it was just some sort of voyeuristic kind of thing. I didn’t have any knowledge of – or care about – actually selling stuff until later.
Ariel Pink in Los Angeles. October, 2019. Credit: Cameron Murray for Weirdo Music Forever
BW: Speaking of record stores, you and R. Stevie Moore both worked at record stores, and you brought that up to Stevie as Michael Zanna one time…
AP: I never brought that up to him.
BW: I think “Michael Zanna” may have.
AP: Michael Zanna didn’t bring it up either. Michael Zanna was my Hotmail account. I had just opened a Hotmail account, and put Michael Zanna as the name because I didn’t know what this e-mail stuff was and thought, “Well, it doesn’t have to be me, because I don’t want people to know that I’m me or something like that.” It was a PO Box basically, and wrote “Michael Zanna”. Stevie asked who Michael Zanna was, and I said he was my manager. But that was it, and then it got cleared up pretty quickly after that.
BW: And Michael Zanna appears on…
AP: He appears on the song [“Stevie Pink Javascript”] because by the second or third e-mail I ever got from Stevie, it was already established that we were going to collaborate.
BW: Getting into cassette tapes and the Ariel Archives project, I wanted to address the possible confusion around the idea of the lo-fi label. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, because you’ve already expressed that you didn’t set out to make lo-fi music, but I did want to briefly touch on the ideas of hauntology, haunted graffiti, the idea evoked by a title like Worn Copy, and what you did intend when you made your earlier recordings.
AP: I never thought of myself as lo-fi. Lo-fi to me was Lou Barlow in Sebadoh, The Folk Implosion, some Dinosaur Jr…alternative music. I didn’t see what I was doing as that. I thought of it as being avant-garde, or something like that maybe. I didn’t put a label on it, but I was a fetishist about things sounding like they were from another time. The whole esthetic was wrapped up with that, I suppose, and it coincided with me using the 8-track, yielding results that could almost pass as being from a different era. It all meshed together and snowballed from there.
BW: So how much of what we’ve been hearing on the previous versions of the tracks that are being re-released for Ariel Archives is what you had in mind when you originally recorded them?
AP: None of it is what I had in mind going into it. I was just trying to make music as best I could. I didn’t know how to do it exactly, so I felt I could smudge the edges in certain respects and maybe get away with something. It was like a ruse, because for me it was like a pretend thing. I could almost pass myself off as a musician or an artist from a different era. There was a sense that I could create something mysterious because nobody knew who I was. I had anonymity going for me, could leave a lot to the listener’s imagination, and I was hoping that would create the appeal I wanted. I didn’t want to give people any kind of insight into my personality, background, or who I was. I wanted them to stumble onto it the same way that I stumbled onto my interests.
BW: On the topic of documenting, do you think there is a purpose to engaging in what we’re doing right now as I sit here with you asking you questions and having a discussion about your music? People are used to saying it’s important to do, but maybe it’s not. How do you see it?
AP: I think it’s a lot of attention on me that I don’t necessarily…on the one hand I must like the attention, but I feel like I keep circling back to the same things, and that gets a little annoying -- it’s freeze-framed. But it’s kind of what I asked for.
BW: Was it the alley wall in Highland Park that led to the concept “haunted graffiti”, or did the wall come after the idea?
AP: The haunted graffiti thing came before, in the 90s. It was before Ariel Pink. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti is the whole thing. What’s on the graffiti? When you paint over graffiti, it’s still there underneath. It hasn’t gone anywhere – you just don’t know it’s there. It’s like a ghost, a poltergeist, or something like that.
BW: So the wall in the Highland Park alley wasn’t in any way connected to that idea, because it came later.
AP: That was [just] an example that I gave – the idea of haunted graffiti is in the term. What is haunted graffiti? It was a completely arbitrary thing that I made sense of after the fact.
BW: Again, not to retread things you’ve already addressed, but just to clarify – there was a misunderstanding by some that the name “Haunted Graffiti” was a band name, when in fact it was more of a concept, right?
AP: Right – it was the whole idea of having a title for your project. Everybody’s got a band name, or [something] that’s not their name, like Slugbug or Weirdo Music Forever. Stevie [Moore] is not a good example, and neither is Gary [Wilson], but that is what I was used to doing – inventing these band names [and] projects because nobody would listen to you if you were a solo artist.
I thought “Ariel Rosenberg’s Thrash and Burn” had this thing that was me, so that was kind of like a solo thing too. But the next project was going to be “Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti”, like there was a guy named Ariel Pink, and he was presenting you this thing called “Haunted Graffiti”. [It was] sort of a kitchen sink play – a weird hobo presenting a very shabby band, where he’s like, “Behind this curtain…Haunted Graffiti!” It was a made-up scenario. The confusion was in the whole thing. It was designed to be somewhat misleading, so again, you get what you ask for.
Ariel Pink in Los Angeles. October, 2019. Credit: Cameron Murray for Weirdo Music Forever
BW: Something that’s stuck in my memory is that Don Bolles influenced your mouth drums, but maybe that’s not accurate.
AP: It’s just a personal thing. He didn’t influence my mouth drums per se, but he influenced the style of drumming that I was going after with my mouth drums. There’s lots of influences to the mouth drums – he just happened to be one of my favorite drummers in punk rock. Stylistically – especially when I’m doing the faster songs – there’s a certain way that he hits, a certain part of his groove – that I really picked up on.
BW: Which projects of Don’s stick out for you when you’re thinking of his drumming?
AP: I really liked all the drumming that’s on the Jack Nitzsche sessions by The Germs. It sounded powerful, and he’s a little ahead of the beat. The syncopation that he has was key to it, but it’s a little bit amateur too – it’s not like professional drumming. I’m sure he had a hard time getting the timing, and they were probably giving him shit in the studio, but the spirit was there.
BW: As far as Ariel Archives goes, did Mexican Summer approach you with the idea of a re-release project?
AP: Yeah.
BW: And the idea was what – to find the best possible early versions of the tracks, and work from there?
AP: Well, I only wanted to do it if they would do it that way. I only wanted to revisit if I had a chance to put them in a package that was somewhat as intended, because those Paw Tracks releases were severely flawed, and inferior to the originals. So that was my thought process about that.
BW: What was the primary source material for what we hear now through Ariel Archives?
AP: A lot of it I have, and a lot of it Paul [Millar] has managed to go down the rabbit hole of…
Paul Millar: If you don’t mind me jumping in, probably seventy-five, eighty percent of this stuff is the actual original mix that was on the Paw Tracks versions of House Arrest or The Doldrums, but we found either the original cassette tape that it was mixed down to, or some kind of version that was less processed.
Most of [the tracks] are in mono on the old CDs, but they were actually nice stereo mixes made on headphones. So whenever I found something like that, I took it as gospel, because I knew that in the ashram you were mixing it on headphones at night, right?
AP: Uh-huh.
PM: So that’s what he heard, [and] that’s what it was supposed to sound like. [I wanted to] present what it was at the moment of creation, and – importantly – not apply any of my own ego to it. So most of them are in fact the original mixes, but where those didn’t exist, we fortunately had the 8-track master or something, so we could remix it and get the sound, closely following the original. The intent was not to be revisionist, but to be…
AP: Preservatory.
PM: Twenty years later, we were trying to do this as if it had been done in 2002, accurately from original sources.
AP: Right.
Paul Millar showed WMF some of the Ariel Archives source recordings in October, 2019. Photo: Cameron Murray for Weirdo Music Forever
BW: So to recap, Ariel recorded at home in the late 90s, and eventually had cassette tapes that were the final mixes.
AP: Yes.
BW: Those cassette tapes later became Paw Tracks CDs…
AP: They got digitized.
BW: Digitized with a mono mix instead of the original stereo. And why did the mono mix even happen in the first place when they were digitized? Was it just easier to transfer that way?
PM: At the time it was kind of a miracle to get anything on a computer at all, so it’s understandable.
AP: I didn’t know what I was doing; I was very naïve about all sorts of technical issues. I’d never been in a real studio, and never thought about sonic things and all the headache [necessary] to get a record out commercially.
BW: You transferred the tracks to CD, and those transfers became what was released on Paw Tracks?
AP: If only it was that simple. No – I would put it on CD, and then there was the process of me giving that CD to Paw Tracks, and then Paw Tracks giving that CD to Rusty Santos or some other person to master. All along that process of transferring, things get lost, and there is a lot of slippage. I – as much as anybody else – was losing track of what was missing from the thing.
PM: My impression is that you gave a lot of early [recordings] to people and they had absolutely no idea what to do with it – it’s distorted…they usually had plenty of bass, but somebody would try to compensate for some deficiency, when in fact most of the time they didn’t need to do anything at all.
AP: Exactly. Going back to the actual 8-tracks – in recreating this stuff with Paul – it’s become more remarkable to me just how mixed they are, and how I did a lot of the work going into it.
PM: Right. For most effects – like any time you hear reverb or a flanger or something – it’s almost always on the actual multi-track.
AP: It is without fail actually, except for some cases where it’s on the entire mix.
PM: Like “Helen”. Some of those effects I had to remake when I thought they were critical to what the thing was as people heard it.
AP: Whenever his ego got involved!
BW: So for this project, you went back to the earliest recordings possible…
PM: Well, earliest mixes usually, because if you put the 8-track on, this stuff wasn’t mixed to a good cassette deck like one of these Nakamichis. It was mixed down to a Sanyo shelf stereo or boom box that had an auto level compressor on it, and also introduced a ton of distortion. So all the elements were kind of slammed together. That’s tricky to recreate without that exact thing, but I think we managed to do it on the remixes we made. We actually printed [the] new mixes down to cassette again using [a better deck] …
AP: And then made those digital.
BW: What cassette deck were you using for this part of the process?
PM: This is a Nakamichi MR-1 from the early 90s – it’s one of the nicest cassette decks made.
AP: And a lot of the crushing that we’ve added is probably just digital.
PM: Right – it’ll overload the same [way] that any other cassette deck will, because it’s a very constrained medium in terms of the level of frequencies you can record.
Here’s an original homemade Haunted Graffiti tape that somebody gave to Don Bolles after a show – it’s one of the only ones we’ve found, really. Don said it might help, so I borrowed it, and it was a clean, first generation dub of masters. It had less bandwidth than other things that I found which were the original copies. But there were a lot of tracks like “Flying Circles”, “So Glad”, and “I Don’t Need Enemies” that came from this, which sounded fine. [There was] no noise reduction or anything.
Then there were other things, like Eddie Ruscha had a bunch of original CD-Rs, including Worn Copy. We took most of Worn Copy off of one of those, because the Paw Tracks version was a copy of Tim Koh’s version, which had been MP3-encoded. So the Paw Tracks version was really digitally compressed and distorted – it sounded horrible. On the original, there was scarcely any distortion, except for the tape. It was way more listenable.
BW: So we’re hearing some of Eddie’s CD-Rs on which Ariel Archives re-releases?
PM: Worn Copy, and I forget what else. He had them with the artwork, which I scanned a bunch of. I don’t know how much Mexican Summer used.
Ariel Pink cassette tapes that are the Ariel Archives source recordings. Seen here in October, 2019. Photo: Cameron Murray for Weirdo Music Forever
BW: Fast-forwarding to autumn 2019, and we’re here sitting here with several original Ariel Pink cassette tape masters. How close do you feel the first three vinyl re-releases that are out in October come to your original vision?
AP: It’s pretty close. It was fun for me, because I got to make new records – some focused on…
PM: Now we’re in that stage, right? We’ve done all the re-issues, really.
AP: Yeah, pretty much. I’m just entering into the “OK, Ariel – let’s make another Haunted Graffiti record [stage]. How would you have done it back then?” A lot of the songs are on Odditties Sodomies Vol 2, and the ones that are going to be on Vol 3, and also the collections thing. Some are newer tracks, but it’s just getting back more into the frame of mind of how I used to do it, and not so much how I did it when I was on 4AD.
BW: So when you say you’re making new tracks, are you talking about tracks that will be a part of Ariel Archives, or are you talking about a new album as well?
AP: Ariel Archives is a catch-all for the whole series. There are ten releases or more. There are releases that have never actually happened, but since they’re in the Odditties volumes, I’m getting to make it as if they were.
BW: New songs that no one has ever heard before?
AP: Yeah, and old songs that most people haven’t heard before.
PM: Songs that weren’t finished when the 8-track broke down or something.
AP: Yeah, and half-baked ideas.
PM: I’ve run into a bunch of those.
AP: I’ve had opportunities to show those things at various times, [like] on a radio show if they have a cassette deck, like Don’s show. There are people who are completists online who really pay attention to those broadcasts, and they collect and will make YouTube videos. What’s that guy’s name?
PM: Sam Spiwak – his handle is Viewbob. He’s a young guy in Long Island that posts all over the forums. I hit him up looking for stuff, because it was clear [that] not everything exists on original tape. He’s like an encyclopedia of Ariel Pink music.
BW: Is “Bolivian Soldier” an old track?
AP: No, it’s new.
BW: Because to me, it has that quality you’re talking about – the spirit of the early days.
PM: It’s got mouth drums on it.
AP: That’s kind of what I do when I don’t involve too many other musicians, because I play essentially everything on that [one]. Oftentimes, for the records, I’ll employ Kenny [Gilmore], Joe Kennedy, Tim Koh, or Jorge Elbrecht…my buddies. And Henry [Schiff] as well, or [Aaron] Sperske.
I just do music with tons of people, but those are more or less the results that I get when I’m at the helm. So yeah – it’s similar to my old style.
BW: Over the last year, I’ve seen you perform with either small groups or completely solo on a few occasions. You played with Jack Name and Mitchell [Brown] and were pulling material out of your phone to perform with them. I also saw you at Nina Tarr’s comedy evening at NeueHouse pulling up material and performing solo…
AP: I had the 8-track for that one. I brought it, and had a grab bag full of cassette tapes. I was just putting them in, taking them out…
PM: That’s the way you did it a long time ago.
AP: Yeah, I used to do it a lot more.
PM: I know some people in Austin who had seen you do that with a 4-track or 8-track. [You would] put in the tape and turn all the faders up.
AP: Yep. Those shows I did on a 4-track. I made mix-downs onto 4-track so I didn’t have to bring [the master] with me.
BW: Ariel, what has the experience of revisiting these recordings – which you may not have thought about in years – been like for you?
AP: It’s kind of just doing what I always do. I feel like I carry them with me wherever I go. I don’t run away from them. I’ve always kept these things in mind, and they’re part of me.
Ariel Archives, cycle 1 is available to purchase here.
