Ariel Pink

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nomadologist

Guest
the LA thing

Out of curiosity, is anybody outside NY/LA into any of the stuff that's on Ariel Pink's label like Bubonic Plague, Indian Jewelry, Geneva Jacuzzi? Indian Jewelry used to be a band that played with the bf's band, called Nikki Texas + Electric back then I think, Cabs like and an excellent live show, all wore stockings over their heads and crazy shit, and they're all getting pretty big.

There's something like a neo-psychedelia "next big thing" happening over here, or so it would seem if the fact that some of my friends and I are all "myspace" friends with these bands is some kind of indication. Heh.
 
P

PeteUM

It's all grist
He isn't much of a performer live but I think the music on his records is more than adequately served on stage.
 
M

mms

sometimes
nomadologist said:
There's something like a neo-psychedelia "next big thing" happening over here, or so it would seem if the fact that some of my friends and I are all "myspace" friends with these bands is some kind of indication. Heh.
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yes there is that whole arthur underground scene... looks good lots of exchanging ideas..
whats the name of ariel pinks label?
 
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Chris

fractured oscillations
Ariel Pink's label is Human Ear Music, and he's also on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label...

Realy feeling a lot of the new psychedelic stuff coming out as of late. I'm in southern California (Orange County unfortunately) and I'd definitely say there's a new psych scene coming out of Los Angeles right now, particularly in the Echo Park area.

Arthur Magazine has a lot to do with it, bringing together a lot of the current noise, drone, psych, folk, and experimental bands under one banner. It's all been much more interesting than most everything else that's been happening in the indie world these days IMO. I think psychedelia, not as in a retroist aesthetic, but as a more exploratory and open approach to music, is a good thing right now. We need more weirdness.

By the way, this is my first post on Dissensus. Very interesting forum, I'll probably come around more often...
 
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don_quixote

Trent End
i've seen him twice and really enjoyed both gigs. for sure he isnt a performer - he had his back turned to the audience for almost the whole first gig i saw!!
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
Chris said:
Arthur Magazine has a lot to do with it, bringing together a lot of the current noise, drone, psych, folk, and experimental bands under one banner. It's all been much more interesting than most everything else that's been happening in the indie world these days IMO. I think psychedelia, not as in a retroist aesthetic, but as a more exploratory and open approach to music, is a good thing right now. We need more weirdness.
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See, none of this sounds like my cup of tea at all, but I still like Ariel Pink despite myself.
 
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Chris

fractured oscillations
See, none of this sounds like my cup of tea at all, but I still like Ariel Pink despite myself.
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Yeah, I wouldn't group Ariel Pink with anything in particular, there's just as much 80s soft pop influence in there as there is psych.

I've been bored with a lot of the more homogenous sounding indie bands these days myself, but I think the best thing to happen to indie lately is people looking beyond the Velvet Underground and their alumni for influences, and ditching the punk myth that psychedelia and "progressive" music is inherently crap (not to say there isn't a lot of bad prog).

I don't want to see these bands simply retread old ideas though, to me psychedelia means an openness to experimentation, altered conciousness, more focus on texture, etc. To me shoegaze, dub, most if not all rave subgenres, kraut rock, dreampop, experimental noise, etc, are all psychedelic styles, in their effect if not their aesthetic. It has nothing to do with whether they play guitars and have long hair, it could be synths and cropped hair.
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
Chris: I get what you're saying totally. But if somebody described their music to me as "psychedelic", I would run a mile.
 
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Chris

fractured oscillations
Haha, yeah, I have the same reaction to hearing something described as "just rock n roll."
 
M

mms

sometimes
swears said:
Chris: I get what you're saying totally. But if somebody described their music to me as "psychedelic", I would run a mile.
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why?
i love it as a very tidy summing up of a feeling within a genre, ie it's hip hop but its psychedic., psychedelic soul etc..
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Went to college with Victoria from Beach House, very wonderful person, not my favorite type of music they're doing but it's head and shoulders above a lot of other indie folk revivalists. She had a band called "The Daggerhearts" back then.

"Psychedelic" is a designation that used to make me run and hide, but then I got into White Noise, other Delia Derbyshire/BBC Radiophonic Workshop stuff, United States of America, Silver Apples, Suicide, Krautrock and found out that most of what I liked in current music was a psychedelic sonic inflection. From there I could get into Syd Barrett, but yeah, I still find the Zombies or the Greatful Dead annoying and a lot of music that'ss remembered as being the apex of psychedelia in America is actually the more boring end of what was really out there.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
tht said:
this is to my liking

not sure i have anything original to say about ariel and i feel i should be uneasy about the emaciated regressed narcissism even though i'm not, and any good pop from california would probably be the same

After swinging by his father's gleaming La Cienega office building to pick up a check, which Ariel immediately cashes at a local bank, we arrive at his West L.A. apartment
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"I fell in love with rock & roll in my bedroom with the headphones on," he says. "Rock & roll really meant the world to me. It was a promise of something. Who knows, sometimes I think I'm just some displaced import from another generation."

When he says this, doesn't he understand that according to his ethos, his "process," and the ultimate "hauntological" point his music makes, that we're all just "some displaced import from another generation"?

I like Ariel Pink's recordings, but they're nothing I always want to listen to. I have to be in the mood. I like the sonic sort of affectations, the analog tape feel, the fuzzy spectral thing.
 
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tht

akstavrh
that is what i used to think, after a time it's easier to neglect the affectations

everyone writing about him highlights los angeles (or california more generally), the eternal nowness of the entropic centre of the trash/pop universe and all of that

ariel p's talent is to be able to shift through anachronisms with a lability that disorientates the listener ('surely this has to be a sample?' etc), there are none of the sentimental or temporal attachments of the rest of indie which is displaced somewhere and sits down complacently
 
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swears

swears

preppy-kei
"After swinging by his father's gleaming La Cienega office building to pick up a check, which Ariel immediately cashes at a local bank, we arrive at his West L.A. apartment..."

That's it, now I know he actually doesn't exist at all and is merely a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
 
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tate

Brown Sugar
the suggestion that ariel pink is somehow sonically significant strikes me as peculiar . . . people were saying virtually the same thing about bee thousand in 1994.
 
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tht

akstavrh
the suggestion that ariel pink is somehow sonically significant strikes me as peculiar.
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and?

there isn't a lot of love for ariel from the american indie scene afaik (those who assumedly loved gbv, and now buying shit like sufjan/newsom/arcade fire)

and the home taping thing seems to be the product of necessity (somewhat fetishized), completely unrelated to the 90s indie fixation of authenticity and lo-fi shittyness as end in itself - ariel pink has said he would like to have the chance to do an expensively produced album
 
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T

tate

Brown Sugar
tht said:
and?

there isn't a lot of love for ariel from the american indie scene afaik (those who assumedly loved gbv, and now buying shit like sufjan/newsom/arcade fire)

and the home taping thing seems to be the product of necessity (somewhat fetishized), completely unrelated to the 90s indie fixation of authenticity and lo-fi shittyness as end in itself - ariel pink has said he would like to have the chance to do an expensively produced album
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"Product of necessity," hahaha. Are you suggesting that Ariel Pink uses an 8-track because he can't afford other means? That's odd, as the costs of recording are cheaper than ever before, it's one of the basic facts about the industry today. For A Pink's kind of thing, you can get an Alesis 8-track mixer with USB bundled with cubase for $150 and have far, far more recording power than with his tape machines . . . come on. He chooses his recording means for a reason, and an aesthetic one at that, presumably. I like some of what he does, more power to him, and to his fans, I say. I just don't find it to be something that I haven't heard done before, in very similar ways, sometimes better, sometimes worse, twelve or thirteen years ago.

Anyway, it sounds as if *you* are the one concerned with 'authenticity,' not bob pollard lol.
 
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