Ariel Pink gig in London.

Woebot

Well-known member
13th June at The Spitz.

Doors 7pm, Two Support Acts.

Ariel starts circa 10.30pm

Paying Guest List (you can reserve tickets but have to pay for them on the door) Call 020 7392 9032.

£7.

Really looking forward to this one.
 

daren

Well-known member
I recently saw Ariel Pink with his posse in Chicago (at a university paid contest!). I thought he was pretty enjoyable, but his stage prescence is really goofy, which may or may not turn people off. I personally thought it was hilarious.
 

bun-u

Trumpet Police
yes - i should be there too.

I wonder does he recreate that cassette-recording sound in a live setting?
 

appleblim

Well-known member
yeah, also Bristol Cube Cinema on June 9th.....

gonna try and make it to this or the london one, as Max Tundra is DJing at the Spitz one, which makes it double exciting....

intrigued to know how he'll replicate it all.......i like the sound of goofy stage presence too....!
 

soupstain

Member
Did anyone go to this? I saw his Bristol gig last night and I'd be interested to hear your reactions. I've not heard any of his recordings, but I invited some people from work on the basis of his psychedelic-pop-outsider-genius reputation. I spent the first couple of songs thinking I was going to be crucified. The fuzzy cassette-recording sound seems to have been pretty well adapted to the stage and the vocals were way up in the mix with an echo effect that made them utterly incoherent. You could tell that there was sixties-ish pop music being played, but covered with several layers of ugly aural shit. Ariel Pink himself spent the gig striding back and forth across the stage, yelling urgently into the mic, playing with his hair and fiddling with a sleep mask.

That said, it was a great spectacle and I really enjoyed the way that the tunes would occasionally rear up out of the murk before being buried under the vocals. Are the records anything like this?
 

Woebot

Well-known member
soupstain said:
Did anyone go to this? I saw his Bristol gig last night and I'd be interested to hear your reactions. I've not heard any of his recordings, but I invited some people from work on the basis of his psychedelic-pop-outsider-genius reputation. I spent the first couple of songs thinking I was going to be crucified. The fuzzy cassette-recording sound seems to have been pretty well adapted to the stage and the vocals were way up in the mix with an echo effect that made them utterly incoherent. You could tell that there was sixties-ish pop music being played, but covered with several layers of ugly aural shit. Ariel Pink himself spent the gig striding back and forth across the stage, yelling urgently into the mic, playing with his hair and fiddling with a sleep mask.

That said, it was a great spectacle and I really enjoyed the way that the tunes would occasionally rear up out of the murk before being buried under the vocals. Are the records anything like this?

ha! sounds just terrible! excellent, i cant wait.

ive twisted fisher's arm and he's gonna come too.
 

don_quixote

Trent End
haha, listening to worn copy right now. actually for the first time right through... i saw his band back in january when he was meant to be playing supporting panda bear, but he got deported. i'm not sure how differently it'll work, just watching his band was fairly strange.
 

appleblim

Well-known member
hey soupstain!

i was there!

i thought it was AWESOME, even though i was suffering rather badly from food poisoning at the back of the venue........kind've aded to the overall delerious vibe tho!

sounded JUST like the records, in a good way, if a little too loud......not often i say that either......if u stuck yr fingers in yr ears, the melodies really shone thru, it was all lost in that middley distortion.....

i thought the bass player and guitarist were ace, really tight underneath that maelstrom of echoplexed grunting and sighing......what a performer!.....i loved the way he kept peeking out of the bottom of that nightmask thingie to see where he was on the stage! classic!

most of the tunes he played came from Haunted Graffiti 5, which i bough a CDR direct off him on the night.....everyone should REALLY check this one out, its amazing....its apparently coming out soon-ish, tho i think there is also a double cd version of it that is rapidly becoming a collectors item....

had a good chat with him afterwards too, waxing lyryical about R Stevie Moore, and Martin Newell and the Cleaners From Venus, who i have yet to check out....supposed to be ace in an Andy Partridge, Syd Barrett, kinda way.......

was askin him about The Chysanthemums and Deep Freze Mice too, as thats where i first heard of R Stevie Moore......can anyone else shed any light on these droogs?

he was stepping into a real recording studio the day after the Bristol gig for the first time too! Southern will be putting the fruits of it out apparently....

enjoy The Spitz gig everyone, will be very interested to hear yr reactions........
 

3underscore

Well-known member
Hooray - last minute planning is great. Looks like I will be along tonight. How the hell do you go about reconising a Matt Woebot?!
 

soupstain

Member
appleblim said:
i thought it was AWESOME, even though i was suffering rather badly from food poisoning at the back of the venue........kind've aded to the overall delerious vibe tho!

Yeah, I can see how that might help. I've just ordered Worn Copy from Paw Tracks, so I'll be sure to eat a badly-cooked kebab or something before I listen to it.

Enjoy yourselves tonight, Spitz-goers. I've now read the info at the top of the thread properly and realised that I was a little premature in asking if anyone had been.
 

huffafc

Mumler
I thought I should drop a line in support of Ariel Pink. Although I don't necessarily buy any of that outsider-artist fluff, I think you really don't need to in order to appreciate his music. I posted something about DJ Screw a few days ago and it seems like Pink and Screw are both able to dig out something repressed in the genres they reference. While Screw finds a kind of sadness and meditativeness in hip-hop, Pink finds the uncanny nightmare in the comfort music that is AM soft rock.

I do have to admit that after seeing him live he and his band do waver between almost falling apart into total incoherence and falling apart into total incoherence. They're great when they barely keep it together, but at other times they just sound like a mediocre psychedelic noise band. So it's hit or miss on stage.

R. stevie moore is great! A lot of reviewers have said that Moore took Pink under his wing at some point and showed him all the crazy-person-alone-in-his-ransacked-bedroom-with-a-broken-tape-recorder tricks. Anyway, he's a great musician, in his own right, kind of a pioneer of the sound. He's recorded hundreds of songs over more than fifteen years. Here's a particularly Ariel Pinkish Moore song if anyone's interested:
R. Stevie Moore - You Can't Write A Song
 
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Woebot

Well-known member
loved this. also the gary wall and john maus on their own were great too. what a great band

highlights:
• ariel's sleep goggles
• the way he does this dead 80s little flourishes with his hands
• the drum machine. awesome. get rid of drummers. walked to the gig listening to early cabs and came away relishing the sonic parities.

they got better and better through the night.

picked up haunted graffiti 3 and 4 at the gig

heres a deliberatley crap photoshopped snapshot of the gig.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
house arrest and lover boy _ haunted graffiti 5 (which are about to be available through acute) are actually available at the iTunes store (of all places!) but it'd be really expensive, not to say a complete rip-off to purchase them there.
 

SMorlighem

Well-known member
They play July 3rd at la Fondation Cartier, Paris. I dislike this place (saw Red krayola there two months ago) and it might be full of hipsuckers, but I shall go...
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Anti-fi

Yes, imagine an alternative universe in which alternative pop was still a possibility. Imagine, that is, a world in which there was no Coldplay, Athlete, Elbow and other priests of anthemic pathos...

That's where Ariel Pink comes from. I went to the show at Matt's behest having heard nothing, armed only with Simon's description of the band as 'uncanny, oneiric' and what people had said on this thread. Having a bill of three acts, all of whom belonged to this warped genre (and all of whom, as Matt said, played in Ariel Pink's band) was a stroke of genius, since it made you feel that this Lynchesque sound - peculiar, pre-set driven, Seeds-like psych-punk with all edges subtracted by a mix that wasn't so much muddy as deliberately muddied - was nothing out of the of the ordinary. (The garage punk thing is one thing that connects AP with the early Cabs, actually, to follow on from Matt's observation). But it is precisely this ease with strangeness that makes AP so UNeasy, uncanny (and why those more determined to sell themselves as 'weird' usually fail to do so).

The miasmatic mix made it seem like there was a wall of sound between you and the act, so that it was exactly as if they were trying to copy that 'fuzzy cassette sound' Soupstain talks about upthread. Their pursuit of that C90 fuzz and fug - like they were trying, live, to simulate a poor quality recording of themselves playing live - was what produces both the oneiric and the sublime qualities of their sound. It is not make do and mend lo-fi so much as ANTI-FI, a deliberate fogging of the digitally hyper-clean, with the result that what you are hearing is as much doubt and speculation as anything else. The force of the volume gave the sound a desubstantialised physicality, like <i>Loveless</i>-era MBV playing Suicide cover-versions. As with <i>Loveless</i>, you feel that as you are hearing the songs you are forgetting them AND that what you are hearing is a remembered dream.

Ariel looked like a twelve-year old Mickey Rourke doing an Alan Vega impression, and the sheer amount of delay on his vocals reinforced the overall sense of fracture and dislocation. Each new phrase only added to the wreathes and wraiths of echo that were already shrouding the mix, so that the movements of his mouth bore little relation to the sounds that we were hearing - like he was an actor in a badly dubbed film.

Great stuff.
 
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drowned in sound

They sounded like thirty bands at the bottom of a swimming pool, playing for the last thirty seconds of their life at the behest of an evil lifeguard, who may or may not be Momus.

But who was the guy on before him (who also played keyboards in the band)? Gary War? In a way I preferred this - all the purely psychotic bits of Ariel Pink, plus basic pre-set keyboard, without the slightly comforting fuzz-out distancing-effects of all those guitars and sonic whirls.

Loved the way they kept being surprised at having to play encores cos everyone was cheering so much.

Yeah, a world in which bands like that were the 'pop alternative' would be brilliant!
 

3underscore

Well-known member
I sort of likened it to the idea that you are listening to a really good melodic tune on an AM radio, but can never quite get tuned in - continually losing elements, sometimes losing the whole current of the track.

It has kind of reminded my just now that if they are going to do a first proper studio album, someone like Mark Linkous would be perfect to help gain that sound - he too has that ability to isolate the sound from listeners.
 

bun-u

Trumpet Police
I missed this by a day. I turned up on Sunday night with friends to claim my reserved 4 tickets only to find it was David Grubbs that night and Ariel Pink on Monday. We elected for the pub instead and as only I was available to go on Monday night, I um’ed and arh’d and declined the opportunity to go to what sounds like the gig of the year. I haven’t done anything this stupid since I turned up for a job interview a week early.
 

soupstain

Member
k-punk said:
Each new phrase only added to the wreathes and wraiths of echo that were already shrouding the mix, so that the movements of his mouth bore little relation to the sounds that we were hearing - like he was an actor in a badly dubbed film.

Yeah, at times the way the music came out seemed completely disconnected from what the musicians were actually doing. Something else mentioned by Appleblim and K-Punk that I'd forgotten was the sheer volume of the gig - it seemed much louder than usual at the Cube - which made the spectacle even more disorienting.

This is why I'm a little sceptical about listening to AP's music outside of the gig situation. I listened to a couple of recorded tunes via the Paw Tracks website last night and I was a bit underwhelmed, partly because of the relative clarity of the vocals (the "effects" were limited to the inherent distortion of the recording technique) and partly because of the lack of volume (there's only so much you can achieve with home stereo speakers).

Perhaps sceptical is the wrong word... it might be better to think of AP live and AP on record as two distinct things, since what is missing from the recordings (ie. volume, extreme delay/FX, the onstage behaviour of Ariel Pink himself) is really the essence of the live show. It seemed to me that the musicians - or at least AP - were using the volume and FX to cede a certain amount of control over the way the songs sounded, eg. you can't tell how your vocals are going to turn out with any precision if you feed them through that level of delay. Perhaps the sleep mask was part of this too - as Appleblim said, he had to keep having to lift them so that he could see where his wanderings had taken him.
 
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