There is a case to be made that Ariel Pink’s earliest music has always been a bit haunted. The whole wad of funhouse pop—pulled from crackly master tapes and spawned into reissues of reissues of reissues—keeps floating wraith-like towards listeners, two decades later. It’s how Pink himself described it in a Tiny Mix Tapes interview in 2006:
“Once something is captured, it carries an objective power that lives outside of time and reality. It can be manipulated [...] like a person without a body that it can call its own. The world of sound has no visible territory or domain that it can claim. It offers its own spirit to the world for the sake of play and wonderment.”
Pink’s idea of what would happen to his music mirrors an idea that writers Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds were calling “hauntology” the same year. Each considered Pink’s music as the zeitgeisty sound of “time collapsing on itself”—the clearest sign that culture had crossed into an era where nothing could die. Or if by some chance it were to die, as they wrote, it would inevitably come back as a reissued collection.
This isn’t to say a new and expansive reissue effort by Mexican Summer under the name “Ariel Archives” is a cynical cultural ploy. Rather, it just feels procedural in this phase of Pink’s two-decade career, not to mention one that feels cobbled together by aggrandized marketing language. Consider also that the musician’s entire career has been a retrospective project, vis a vis his managing and administering the vast musical trove he compiled in a blur of recording between 1999 and 2004. But these are “definitive” releases, the Brooklyn-based label notes, paired with expanded tracklistings, new art by Pink, remastered, and featuring thoughtful essays by Hedi El Kholti, the co-editor of publishing imprint Semiotext(e). The whole collection spans the six albums Pink recorded with his imaginary band Haunted Graffiti, plus three volumes of rarities. It’s the closest thing to a final destination for a catalog that has spent the better part of two decades in various states of disarray, sliding across our musical consciousness, across trends, and attitudes like a discarded CD-R on a trashed car floor.
Split into four reissue cycles, the Ariel Archives begins with an odd trio: 1999’s Underground, 2002’s Loverboy, and the collection Odditties Sodomies Vol 2. The musical distance covered by just these three albums mirrors the varied locales in Los Angeles where Pink conceived them—an ashram in South Central, a ranch house in Val Verde where Graham Nash and a Grateful Dead percussionist once recorded, and his CalArts dorm room from which Underground first emerged.
Pink says he simply took the sounds in his head and directly injected them into cassette machines of dubious quality, and Underground is the most spontaneous sounding of Pink’s early albums. It’s the one Haunted Graffiti album from this time with the least sense of itself, confined to the same handful of open guitar chords, an idea of sunbleached guitar anthems, and an idea of teenage ennui. “I stole a car so we could run away/Slow down I gotta hear you stay,” Pink sings in “Underground,” a lean guitar and mouth-drums combo that wanders over a melody like a stoned night drive.
More than just fetish material for Pink completists, the reissues are most notable because Pink’s equally demonized, glorified, and debated lo-fidelity has been officially tampered with. The original master tapes were made available to credible engineers with good intentions. Unlike the flawed Paw Tracks reissues, the squashed mono mixes of both Loverboy and Underground have been cracked open into a wide stereo field. While a thin layer of tape hiss still hangs above each record like freeway smog, the depths unlocked by the remaster clear space for us to participate in Pink’s original fantasy more than ever. The tumbling AM-radio confections “My Molly” and “Doggone (Shegone)” can be imagined, faintly at least, as actual AM-radio hits, lost soft-rock artifacts recovered on a Saturday morning drive pouring out from a busted rear speaker.
Loverboy and Underground’s newfound fidelity muddies the bigger picture of Pink’s legacy. Specifically, the idea that his work as Haunted Graffiti was a mere prelude to studio budgets, the dismal sonics of these albums an arbitrary choice, a condition of some broke musician recording in a squat. Instead, the precision remastering bolsters the minority opinion of what Fisher described as “anamorphic sonic objects.” The anamorphic being the idea of sounds working on the periphery of comprehension, combining into something radically different. In this view, Pink’s aesthetic wasn’t a fuzzy approximation of some “Porcelain Heaven” as Pitchfork writer Mike Powell wrote in 2006, but a visionary style unto itself. An intentional musical vernacular existing, in the end, as a gauzy, unified whole.
In this context, given the clarity of the reissues, Loverboy is a futurist pop cycle. From the spectral, pulsing organs on “Ghosts” and “Don’t Talk to Strangers” to the shuffling mouth drums on “She’s My Girl,” Pink’s bedroom feels palatial, some hyper-baroque synth chamber hovering between this dimension and the next. It’s all very “time out of joint” as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described his original concept of “hauntology.”
But don’t let the seriousness of that concept jam you up. Both Loverboy and Odditties sound like they exist simply for the sake of play and wonderment, the latter showcasing Pink’s ability to toggle between styles (Britpop, new wave) and impersonation (be it Kate Bush whispers of “The World is Yours” or the eyes-closed Morrissey delivery in Pink’s cover of “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”). Instead of the usual line about Pink defacing the ideal of pop music, he’s actually defacing himself, either through the puffed up embellishment, of “Didn’t it Click” (“Ladies and gentlemen/The master of ceremonies, Ariel Pink!”) or the emasculated self-deprecation in the chorus of “Loverboy” written with John Maus. (“I love you like a dog or snake or a mouse or a bird/That's why they call me loverboy.”)
All the talk of Pink’s musical “nostalgia” feels a bit propped up now—maybe it was ours all along? This haunted question was answered straightforwardly as far back as 2001 when Pink covered R. Stevie Moore’s “Hobbies Galore.” It’s the anthem of his complicated fiefdom, a tribute to the idea of himself, signs of a persona seen in the third-person, and an homage to his mentor.
“Gee it’s great to be home/Hobbies galore/Don’t you engage in a craft/Don’t you like it alone/Locked behind doors,” Pink sings, sounding a bit like he’s nodding out on the strength of his own stuff. Who would blame him? The dark ages had just counted off a deathly tune—9/11, Bush, black sites, suicidal markets—and Pink was the one who could harmonize over it, as long as he was left alone, locked behind his many doors.
Buy: Rough Trade (Underground) (Loverboy) (Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2)
