ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI

Worn copy

CD/2LP, Paw Tracks

Aww allright, when “The Doldrums” came out, Paw Tracks – the label somehow around the Animal Collective, don’t ask for details, because I don’t know – they made us believe that they found Ariel Pink hiding behind some bushes in the Hollywood hills, a tape grasped in his hands, that he wanted but didn’t dare to give them. “Recorded in relative seclusion” it still says on the website. But now the truth is out: instead of being a newfound, musical Caspar Hauser or Mogli, child of the jungle, Ariel Pink already had a proper release under his own name out on Rhystop records. I’ll admit that this had happened in a rather obvious clandestiny and on a really smale scale, even if compared to Paw Tracks. And I also know that “The Doldrums” had already been released as a CD-R years back.

But still I wonder, why did nobody ever mention this first lp. Finding holes such as this in press-releases always gets me going in theories, which might be more or less conspiratorial, but see yourself: Maybe the label just didn’t know any better. Or maybe Ariel Pink never told them. Or Ariel Pink doesn’t even really exist and this is just to hide some project from some artist who doesn’t want to be known (who could it be? Thurston Moore? Ariel Rosenberg? Don Van Vliet? Ted Nugent? Kurt Cobain?). Maybe the material recorded sounded so outdated somehow that Paw Tracks decided to call it a re-release. Or maybe they just had a lot of fun doing it. You see, I like to get on my horse and ride away in all directions.

And Ariel Pink or whoever would happily be my company. I have read the phrase “a ride through musical history” or “taking up stuff from all genres” a lot in reviews, but nowhere did it ever fit better than here. The list would start somewhere and then implode in spirals somewhere in the mid Seventies (without ever touching anything close to modern electronic music, that is the only fixed point). Like this: Rush, Beach Boys, Donna Summers, Pink Floyd, Creation, Buffalo Springfield, Neu!, The Byrds, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Plastic Bertrand, Wilson Pickett, Rolling Stones, Sebadoh, Kim Fowley, Set Fire To Flames, America, Eric Burdon (in his psychedelic phase), homolka, Lutefisk, Neil Diamond, Peter Frampton, Ten Years After, Uriah Heep, Toto, Yes, Van der Graaf Generator, X, Psychedelic Furs, Enola Gay, Guided by Voices, Harry Pussy, Gary Numan, Lionel Ritchie, Frank Zappa, Oliver Onions, Bevis Frond, and ever and ever so on. I’ll stop now before you get the impression that I am just trying to waste webspace to make this review longer. You get the drift. The rhizomatic spreading of ideas, that seems to come from within an off itself without being set off by outer influences, which of course, is not at all possible, because somewhere in our lives we all get exposed to radio-radiation or top of the pops on tv. So it seems all mixed into one vision in here and everything seems to be mixed into this vision.

This is the first time I will really try to describe a record by telling what it isn’t and you can be sure, that whatever is missing out is somewhere on here: “worn copy” is not an electronica record or a hip hop record. It is not tied to a single style, unless you don’t count the music aequivalent to obsessive compulsive trashcollecting as a single style. It is not clean or crisply produced, and the production is not on a distinct level but changes here and there. There are no Top40-hitsingles on there and by itself the single songs don’t seem to bee too far out or too avantgarde, so they keep within known structures, though they try to get around any kind of border by all means they can find. This won’t ever be a popular alternative rock record. It also won’t be one of those records, that over time will build up a big following, like “Trout Mask Replica”, and find its place in the musical canon. More likely, there will be a handful of people who will remember it as a true beauty of weirdness and psychedelic tomfoolery. The rest, except for the fact that it is a rather long record, without getting boring, is beyond me. And what better can you say about a record.

But I’d like to see a concert with Harry Merry and Ariel Pink performing together and The Reynols as a backup-band. That would be bliss and revelation at the same time. Please, make it happen.