Shades of Pink

Many 8-year-old boys spend their time playing with Legos and action figures. Growing up in Los Angeles, Ariel Pink preferred to play with tape recorders. By high school, he had recorded hundreds of his own cassette tapes filled with thousands of original songs.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Pink burned and distributed CDRs of his analog material under the rubric of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. Pink’s material is equal parts classic pop, showtunes, David Bowie and serious outsider music a la Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston.

This sonic kaleidoscope is further distorted by Pink’s deliberate lo-fi production, which features Pink playing off his low-tech recording techniques, and really amps up the hissing and distortion.

The result? Always energetic, richly layered, sometimes incomprehensible and often just plain weird.

Nonetheless, Pink has a definite flair for writing some of the most perfect, twisted pop this side of The Residents.

In 2003, Pink passed a CDR on to Animal Collective. Animal Collective had just started their Paw Tracks record label, and decided to reissue some of Pink’s albums. Pink was the first artist signed to the label (other than Animal Collective themselves), high praise indeed. 2004 saw Pink’s first official release, Doldrums, a 15-track reissue of a CDR Pink originally distributed in 1999.

Since then, Paw Tracks has reissued two more Pink releases. Other record labels have also printed collections of his work. Because the majority of his work is self-released, much of it is not commercially available. What has been released comes from his in-progress “Haunted Graffiti” series, which have gained him attention both locally and internationally.

Ironically, Pink’s live performances have not enjoyed the same renown as his oeuvre. Until recently, Pink was a one-man show, relying on pre-recorded music and percussive noises made with his mouth, rather than conventional instruments. Pink’s music was never intended to be performed live, and negative responses to his concerts have somewhat tempered his critical reception.

A miniscule budget meant that Pink could not compensate musicians, leaving him to rely on karaoke performances and ad-hoc collections of musicians recruited from the bands Pink toured with. He has been practically booed offstage several times.

But 2008 saw Pink turn away from his solo shut-in past to record his first 7″ with a full band. His current tour with The Vivian Girls is the first time he has had a consistent group of musicians to work with. This arrangement also enables Pink to attempt to recreate the dense sonic soundscapes that he painstakingly crafted in isolation.

The result should be a tighter, more conventional live experience, although the spontaneity and improvisation of Pink’s live compositions promise that there will still be some surprises.

It’s fitting that Pink should tour with a band named for Henry Darger’s work. Darger was, like Pink, a visual artist who was made most famous for a 15,000-plus page illustrated manuscript that was discovered posthumously (from whence comes The Vivian Girls’ moniker) in his apartment.

If Pink had been around before the advent of CDRs and the Internet, it’s easy to imagine that he could have remained invisible, only to be rediscovered decades from now and revered as a reclusive genius whose music was never heard.

Fortunately, Pink is enjoying accolades and recognition during his lifetime and he’s fated to go down in history as an incredibly significant American artist. After his gig at the Holocene he’ll be playing Coachella, so this may be your last chance to catch this emerging luminary in a small venue.