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Music
Inout | The cph post entertainment guide
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti Store Vega Mon 20:00 190kr, www.billetnet.dk www.vega.dk
A
riel Pink raises conflicting opinions, but if you had to reach a consensus on a term to describe him, it would probably have to be ‘weirdo’. For good or bad, Ariel Marcus Rosenberg is an authentic specimen of a 21st century internet-era genuine weirdo. Ariel, a man crowned by a fuchsia Iggy Pop-like hairdo, knows this is not accidental, and that his inherent eeriness is an aesthetic driving force. After all, it was him who expressed his vocation in terms of making “the worst
thing − the thing that even people who liked bad, terrible music wouldn’t like”. No wonder The New York Times once called one of his 2004 performances “an experiment in driving two-thirds of the audience out the door”. Ariel Pink was born 34 years ago in the Beverlywood area of Los Angeles. The offspring of a broken marriage, the former heavy metal devotee turned goth, who is also an art-school dropout, has searched for his own personal musical narrative. The Cure was the last ‘new’ band he cared about; since then, he has been spiralling down secret tunnels of musical obscuritiy. Ariel’s art is the manifestation of his own musical cosmology, which appears to be familiar, yet murky and abnormal.
16 - 22 November 2012 The musical landscape painted by Ariel Pink feels like it is a collection of humankind’s musical history, as dreamt by a hyperactive kid. Only Ariel could present an interpolation of ‘Love me Do’, singing lyrics like: “She’s a nympho at the bibliotheque, Dr Mario, colonoscopist.” This is an odd mix, but it kind of sums up the polychromatic features of his music. Due to the success of his last two records, Before Today and this year’s Mature Themes, one could be fooled into thinking that Ariel is a relatively new name on the music scene. However, he has in fact been releasing home-made music since 1996, working as a oneman band, recording all the instruments himself, and even transforming his
mouth and armpits into beat-machines. It wasn’t, though, until the release of his album The Doldrums, through Animal Collective’s label Paw Tracks in 2004, that his name began to circulate, before he made his real breakthrough with the release of Before Today in 2010. Over time Ariel Pink has acquired a fully-fledged band, Haunted House Graffiti, and the muddy qualities of his music have taken on a cleaner sound. However, the eccentricities, complicated structures and idiosyncrasies of his music have not been sacrificed as he has become well known. Today he just manages to feed his zany music to more people. There’s undoubtedly a mastery to his performance level, which is matched
by a band that often includes the legendary R Stevie Moore, Ariel’s personal guru. For Ariel, the stage has become a second home: a platform for his musical and individual personalities to burst out. This month, two years after a soldout concert at Loppen, we have the opportunity to witness music’s most genuine weirdo and his pack once again. If we are lucky he will sing under dim purple lights and open a door to his peculiar musical valley. Ariel once declared that the unconscious is the territory that he mines more than anything, and maybe we will discover that we are all a bit weird ourselves. Letitia Despina