Back in 2013, I had some conversations with ARIEL PINK with the intention of writing a book about his entire works, a task so hard that it was never accomplished — I was 18 years old! However, three long—really long—calls were made, and we analysed The Doldrums (2000), Lover Boy (2002), and some miscellaneous. These are in-depth interviews that, to this day, ARIEL PINK never gave to any media.

This is the first interview, the first of three, that was in March 2013. It was arranged by phone and recorded by Skype after Ariel had just had lunch with Tim Koh, the former band bassist. They had a show on Saturday and were trying to get a sound guy at the last minute.

Firstly, what do you remember about that era?

I remember everything. I was living up in Belvedere. I was going to University. And yeah, I was living at this house. I was renting a room at this house in Belvedere, a remote place. It was about an hour and 20 minutes outside of L.A., and there was a lot of nature. It’s kind of… just this kind of weird little community in the mountains. I also got a room with people who played with the Grateful Dead, the Diga Rhythm Band, and Mickey Hart. His name was Jim Loveless. He was this guy who rented the room out to me. There was a trailer on the property and another kind of hippie, burn-out girl from the 60s who was like 60 years old. But she was a musician too, but she had lost it a little bit. And she was living there. She was lovely, Kathy. And yeah, I was just going out with a girl named Rebecca Lynn, a musician, and we played together occasionally in the band THE CENTIMETRES back in LA. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but they’re really good. 

No, I never heard of them. Are there any recordings of that available?

Oh, yeah. There are several recordings, but we also had our band, and there were live recordings. I did her record. She has a solo record. We played her songs mostly. And I was playing backup and producer, more or less. 

Are you still in touch with her?

 I still talk, and every once in a while, I will go, and well, every once in a while, she calls me, and we talk for a long time, and we get caught up.  When we went out, she was older than me, like ten or fifteen years older.

So you lived with her?

No. I mean, I was living in this house. Then, later on, I moved after, around 2001. Actually, sorry, I got the dates wrong. We were with each other from 1999 until 2001. So that’s how I remember. So then, yeah, in 2001, I was recording House Arrest (2002), Loverboy (2002), Scared Famous (2001), and Fast Forward (2001) in a Hindu ashram. That was after I moved out of Belvedere. That was it. 

And Underground (1998)?

Yes, Underground was recorded while living in my studio at CalArts. 

But if The Doldrums was before, why is it labelled 2004?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Doldrums in 2004 was the first time it was properly released as a record. I used to make my records at the time, not on vinyl, but on CDs. I used to burn CDs and cassette tapes. And they were all custom-made. I would just make copies and copies. Before even Underground, I had a different project called the APPALACHIANS and GORILLA, and before that, there was another thing called ARIEL ROSENBERG’S TRASH AND BURN. These were all very experimental improvisational projects that I had. Then, with the birth of the Haunted Graffiti series with Underground, I pretty much started working with eight tracks rather than four. And that marked a new beginning of songwriting and stuff like that.

Do you still have them?

Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. It’s easier to find that. Some recordings need to be listed on the Internet. I don’t even think about these tapes anymore, for the most part. And a lot of them I stole from myself years ago, but that’s not such a big deal. 

What would be “the doldrums”?

 The doldrums is a word that… I take it to mean… It’s kind of dull, kind of melancholic, or something like that. I like it more; the doldrums are like a dark, foreboding isolation. 

Angst?

Well, yes and no. I wanted to make that statement. I wanted to make a very, very dark record. 

Even if it’s dark, and I understand its meaning, I find some “happy” things there.

I do, too. I find happy things sad. The happiest songs are always sad because they have emotions, like “Shiny Happy People” from REM.

(Laughs) But do you consider that they are happy songs in The Doldrums?

The happy songs? There aren’t happy songs. They were all sad songs. But if I had to choose the happiest one, it would be… Oh, maybe “Among Dreams” or “Haunted Graffiti”. Or some of the songs I did before that. “Crying”, maybe, or “Don’t Think Twice, My Love”. Or maybe “Theme for Claris Gardens.” 

This album has an interesting cover. How did you come up with that idea?

The idea? I just thought it looked like a graveyard. I wanted to make it look like a graveyard. That’s what it was. 

What is the difference between the album and the others at that time? If you listen to it closely, it differs from the ones you mentioned before.

The main difference is that I did the mouth drums first. 

So, there are no real drums at all?

No, just mouth drums. Just mouth drums first. And that was a record. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying to do something very different from anything I’d heard. I was operating very blind and decided to record the drums first. And then make the song on top of it. But I had to do the drums properly with the parts. I had to do them while anticipating the parts while playing and doing the mouth drums, so I had to sing them in my head. Following the mouth drums is tough when you must learn how the song goes completely. And I don’t play to a metronome, so staying on time is very difficult. 

The bass is incredibly complicated.

Much of it was recorded with two basses and two bass tracks. So it’s usually a wandering bass that’s kind of, well, a bass that’s doing the line, but then I wanted to make it a double voice that you couldn’t distinguish the bass, what the bass lines were. Because it’s wholly buried there and it’s a very, it’s just a low register, so it’s, you know, the effect of one of the basses is cutting out in the mix, it’s cutting out the other one, but you can’t tell because it’s muted. Then the guitar is three-string because I didn’t know how to play six strings yet. So it’s a specific, fragile guitar with only three strings and is rarely used. 

Which one?

The Ibanez is the same one that I had later. Except by then, I had six strings. 

What about the lyrics?

I didn’t care so much about the lyrics then, either. I mean, I got them down. They were just more or less… I didn’t care about them too much. They were the last part of the process in both cases. No, I didn’t care about the lyrics at all. I wrote that one, and I barely even wrote lyrics. I made them up as I went along. I didn’t make up actual words for that one. 

“For Kate, I Wait”. Is that for a real person?

I just thought of a name. It’s not my girlfriend or anything. You could say it’s Kate Bush (laughs).

And what is “haunted graffiti”?

Like… maybe when you have a spray paint that… if you do graffiti on a wall with spray paint, that goes away.

So, that was not a band from the start.

The band? Yeah, so it’s never been a band. It’s always been me. The project, yeah.

I never quite understood the lyrics to “The Ballad of Bobby Pyn.” Are they dedicated to a bully?

“Listen to me, bully, listen to me that” (singing). No, it’s more like I’m talking to myself. It’s just a song I like; I feel like it’s my; that’s one of the darker songs on the record. And I’m talking about just being a… a small, small person, you know, or like I say in “The Doldrums”: “I’m just a killer who can’t kill anything”. So I kind of see myself. I think I saw myself as a very, very disaffected and angry man or something.

So, do you continue with this anger?

 No, no. I’m not so mad at all. Much more relaxed. 

How did you create “The Doldrums sound”?

With wall and delay, synthesisers, and just a keyboard. Very, very cheap keyboard.

So, you knew about Joe Meek as we spoke before.

 I knew about Joe Meek. I was very into analogue stuff before I was into Joe Meek. More like the… I had an ARP synthesiser for years and was very into progressive rock. So, many electronic bands had moogs, oscillators, and generators. Todd Dockstader, for example, is a Stockhausen enthusiast. He taped music in Los Angeles in the ’60s and created soundtracks for cartoons. He was very obscure at the time, even when I bought it, but he was being discovered again for the first time when CDs came around.

What about avant-garde, like noise music?

No, I never got into that specifically, but I got into some noise. I was very into THROBBING GRISTLE, industrial stuff, experimental music in general, and a lot of abstract classical, 20th-century classical, Stockhausen, Berio, Penderecki, anything discordant, but also… Also, many of the 60s experiments, the hard-to-listen experiments into outsider and tuneless music, and very into naive and primitive music.

So, how does R STEVIE MOORE fit here?

Just emailing and being a customer. I was just getting tapes from him, ordering tapes, and enjoying his company on Hotmail for the first time. I had Hotmail. And he was the first email I received once I got to Hotmail. So I sent it out. I sent him my package with The Doldrums and introduced myself. And then he wrote back to me, and I was so excited. He listened to it while he was writing the email. And he said that we should collaborate. And I could have died then because I was so excited. He said that we should collaborate, and then I quickly made some music for the collaboration, sent him a tape, and yeah, that was that. 

“Steviepink”, right?

Yeah, that was the first one. I sent him a tape of different things, but I think he lost the tape. It was all on cassette tapes.

Was he touring or something?

No, he only started touring last year (2012) for the first time.

So, any disappointments looking back on The Doldrums?

No, it’s good. I mean, I’m happy with it. It’s the one I’m the happiest with. But I don’t have favourites, you know. I don’t… The further away I get from it, the easier it is. It becomes for me to appreciate it. More time has passed. It’s the most Ariel Pink style. Yeah, it’s when my style was most crystallised. If you put it in sequence, it’ll make more sense to you because my records are a development. There’s a difference in style between Underground and Fast Forward, for instance. And the real missing piece is The Doldrums. It is very different from Underground but also very different from the rest, which is more of a return to pop style. 

 So, will it be a good idea to do it live? 

Well, we usually are limited by what we are rehearsed for. If we have a new song in the set, it might be an old one, a new one, or one that we haven’t played in a while, but in this case, it will be “Gray Sunset” from The Doldrums. We also learned a new one that I wrote and recorded recently. And then another one called “Bogalusa”, an obscure one from 2004. Then, we have a mixture of the hits from Before Today (2010) and Mature Themes (2012). We like to keep it exciting for ourselves a little bit, but we also have to keep in mind that we don’t have that much time to rehearse.

So, the opening is with something from The Doldrums?

We’re opening with “Gray Sunset”. 

Being a bootleg fan, do you archive your shows?

A lot. That’s why… most people don’t even know how to. The best way to record a show like that is on just a cassette tape and a little recording device. That’s the best way. 

Are you a “fan” of lo-fi, like, doing that purposefully? Also, what reviews did you have of the pre-Before Today (2010) era?

None of my records have gotten good grades until Before Today. That was about five years of bad reviews. Do I enjoy it? Yeah, I like some parts. It’s not the lo-fi that I like. I was exploring stuff. I wanted to be confrontational or something like that. I didn’t want to do noise music. I wanted to do something that noise people wouldn’t like. And I didn’t want to do stuff that SONIC YOUTH people style liked. I didn’t like this world of teenage boys. I wanted to be offensive to them and do something that might be considered gay, and also do something that would be regarded as bad, and also do something that would be considered pop. Now, people say that I’m a pop artist and use pop to describe many things happening, but they never used that word before I used it. 

I was using it to make fun of myself, but the interviewers took it seriously, and then they started using the word pop again because pop was a bad word back in 1999 or 2000. Nobody used that to describe THE WHITE STRIPES, THE STROKES, or anything. That was a bad word for the indie world of music. So, I wanted to be disliked by those people. But this is very different from what I did. Because I was like a hippie to those people. And I was closer, maybe. I also didn’t want to appeal like a stupid hippie political liberal. I wanted to do something that was much more wrong. I wanted to be the worst artist in the world, so I failed. Something like GG ALLIN, a little like THE SHAGGS.. 

Do you like GG ALLIN?

Yeah, I do like GG ALLIN  a lot. I like Phil Ochs, too. Phil Ochs, being the most depressing story, I think, in the entire rock and roll canon is a tragic story. He’s just like a third-rate Bob Dylan. He was known for his protest songs, first, against the war. When Dylan went electric, he left the folk scene behind. He was still known for his earlier songs from around ’65, but he then tried to get a little more arty and personal in his music. And he’s a great lyricist but has a very, very strained voice. And he’s sort of a third-rate Bob Dylan who could never make it. And then, he had problems with alcohol and booze. He was very, very, very discouraged after 1968 when the hippies got beaten up during the riots in Chicago, and he pretty much became an anti-communist, more or less. 

So, you were also discouraged by the media?

I don’t think I was. I was very turned off by it. But I wouldn’t stop them from saying whatever they would say. They change it every couple of years. I’m responsible for Chillwave, Hypnagogic Pop. Hauntology, hipster garbage, lo-fi, Chillwave, and avant-garde pop, whatever they want to call it. I don’t care what they call it. That’s because they don’t know what to call it. I don’t know what to call it, either. 

But you like avant-garde.

I like avant-garde and a little bit of experimental.

I met you at the merch store in Argentina. It was weird that the artist was selling his stuff (laughs)

I always say I’m a merch person first, a sound guy second, and a singer third.

Back to The Doldrums. How were the tours back then?

I never thought about playing shows during The Doldrums. At that time, I only thought about recording. I didn’t have a band, and I didn’t know about it.

Do you ever think about playing the parts live? For example, those complicated bass lines.

Tim Koh is excellent, and he learns my bass lines better than I could. Tim is like a record player. He knows it from beginning to end. Like it’s one thing, he doesn’t memorise little parts. Like the verse, he listens to the song from the beginning to the end, and he remembers the whole thing once, like a one-piece, so he’s never repeating himself. Remember that in that record, everything is all over the place; the guitars, the drums, and the bass line are closest to exactly how they are on the tape.

I always thought you were obsessed with analogue.

I needed to become more familiar with digital. I needed to familiarise myself with something. I try to get as big as possible now, but they’ll be limited as long as I write the songs. But if it is, I’m thrilled. Maybe I’ll do an album like BRITNEY SPEARS or something like that, where I have a producer make the record for me and sing terribly on top of it.

 I did music because I wanted to be loved. And I secretly didn’t love myself, and I was angry at my parents. And that kind of thing. So, I started very intentionally doing something I wasn’t supposed to do. Nobody told me I had a talent for this. I believe that I did, though. I was a composer, a classical music composer. So  I started with all the experimental things in the garage, and then I would play it for friends and people. I would make so many tapes, bug my friends with it, we would get stoned, and I would just turn on these tapes I would make and make everybody have to listen to it, and they maybe would say: “Oh, it’s great”.

I always shared my music, no matter how rough it was. I was listening to music nobody listened to, and I thought I could be one of them that they hadn’t listened to. And this is how I felt about music forever. I still don’t know if they like it or hate it. It’s just that I’m trying to continue a career, so I’m trying to support a band, so I have to care a little bit about making money, and that’s not a bad thing because I don’t think I would do this anymore if I didn’t make any money. I don’t think you would know about me, but it’s the secret to my success. But then you can call it that I was just bold enough to share things in their demo quality. And I never made a demo. I just made records for better or for worse. If people liked it, I would always be very excited and happy.

Eventually, a few of the labels picked some of those early releases and got around to other people making experimental music, like THE ANIMAL COLLECTIVE. So there was a lot of it. I pushed it a lot, gave it away for free for a long time, and believed in myself. People started to believe in me, and then Pitchfork came along and gave me bad reviews, which was a huge popularity boost. I left my job when I started touring. And so that was right when The Doldrums came out again in 2004. And then I started touring, and then I continued.

On my first tour, I had a great time. The second and third tours, well, the third and fourth tours, were the hardest. But the first two were very educational, and I had a good time with my friends, John Maus and Gary War. I had some backing tapes, the original backing tapes, mixed with live players. There were backing tracks with mouth drums, and we were playing stuff from The Doldrums, but we were also mostly playing songs that people hadn’t heard yet. The list depended on the night, but people liked it.

What about your life in Mexico?

I was listening to metal at that time. I went to Mexico for 8th grade, and I’ll be back listening to THE SMITHS and THE CURE—or MINISTRY, THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS, BAUHAUS. See, I fell in love with those bands in Mexico. Anything more I was into before this is in my metal phase. Now I’m listening to my music. I record my ideas on my phone only when I have a lot of ideas. So, the ideas are more with my mouth. And then, when I have parts coming out randomly, they just randomly come to me. After a while, I take all the ideas, record something, and bring it to the band. Or take it to a studio, learn it, and record something. But I wait for the recording period when the label gives me an advance. Most of the time, we would just rehearse for shows if we had them.

Facundo Guadagno

Redactor en Rocktambulos

Antropólogo. Politólogo. Escritor.