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Home alone and Haunted The eternal, reverb-laced return of Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti By Ari Messera&eletters@sfbg.com A friend recently gave me an Asian-girl-groups-of-the-'60s mix CD. For weeks, I awoke to Rita Chao singing with painful sincerity, "My baby does the hanky panky." Weirdo-pop maven Ariel Pink (b. Ariel Rosenberg) moves me in the same twisted-vacation way. Whether he's preaching West Coast truths on "West Coast Calamities" or smoking them on "Gettin' High in the Morning," Rosenberg's truly lo-fi sound — think bathrobes and ashtrays — comes from his dedication to self-imposed house arrest while he records. Though he does gig out, performing as Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, the heart of his intensely personal vision throbs during solitary, late-night recording sessions. By personal account, he has recorded more than 500 songs since 1995. Recalling drawers of teenage love letters, his output has an unmistakable intimacy, a sense that we've caught him in the act. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti's House Arrest, just reissued on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label (originally put out in 2002 as a double CD with Loverboy on Ball Bearings Pinatas) is the kind of album a high school music geek would make if he could step outside of himself. As always, Rosenberg plays everything on the album, layering envelope-filtered guitars and half-sung, half-sputtered vocals, and making all the drum sounds with his mouth. He uses an eight-track cassette recorder; the tunes are washed in a roller rink–meets–monster movie reverb. It's radical, and it's the ultimate Ariel Pink album because it combines the more experimental soundscapes of The Doldrums (Paw Tracks, 2004) with the '80s rock tribute of last year's Worn Copy (Paw Tracks). On House Arrest, self-mockery always means self-discovery. The title track starts with an answering-machine message from Rosenberg's dad, on a tirade about how he won't be bailing out his son this time around. Ariel Pink's response comes over five minutes of rhythmically drunken sonic swelling that owes as much to Pink Floyd as it does to Stevie Moore and AC/DC. Bugger off, Dad — it's not the same music if I turn it down. I spoke to the kindly Rosenberg from Beverlywood, east of UCLA, via cell phone, through mouthfuls of breakfast Thai food after I woke him in the early afternoon. He denies press claims that he's never going to move away from his home base of LA and that his music is a hymn to desert sprawl: "Any LA stuff is circumstantial. I'm not putting it in consciously." He's conscious of the "subliminal" effects of his recording process, the resulting vibration that "sounds like 'baowww' — this muted thing that you can't attach to any instrument." Rosenberg met Animal Collective at a show and handed them a CD-R of his material. Some weeks later they got in touch and offered to sign him to the otherwise Animal Collective–only Paw Tracks (a subsidiary of Carpark Records). "They saved my life!" he exclaims. An odd match? Sure, they're doing different things, but Rosenberg's music, like the nouveau psychedelia of Animal Collective, is more unnerving than annoying. It puts you under its spell immediately. House Arrest never received much attention before its reissue. "The stuff I did years ago is seeing the light of day now," Rosenberg says. "Since then, I've been recording with a lot of people, but lacking focus. It's almost a rite of passage — when I meet somebody, I record them. At the same time, I'm excited about not doing that and getting back to doing my own stuff." His "own stuff" includes samples taken from late-night TV that happens to be on while he's recording — snippets of, say, Baby Jones hosting a late-night special "aren't samples to a musical end. They're just there to bring attention to themselves as a sample." Rosenberg makes drum sounds with his mouth so that he can lay down a guitar track first and "go off the map," without being tied to a set rhythm. "It's much easier to do with my mouth since I have a good read on the rhythms that I naturally create, or sabotage," he says. There's a healthy dose of sabotage throughout House Arrest, centered in songs that are, or aren't, about real people, such as "Helen." "A lot of my songs are fantasy-oriented," he adds, "even when I say 'I.' It's really hard to write about situations that you go through. I'm much better at dealing with third-person, banal subject matter." The only bad thing about House Arrest is that I missed it when it first came out. But that's why reissues, and roller rinks, exist — to keep us moving forward. House Arrest ends with two alien-doowoppy bonus tracks. "It's kind of a joke," Rosenberg says with a laugh. "The album itself never came without 'bonus tracks.' I get off on that kind of thing!" On tour this year he'll be doing "karaoke" to his own material. Rita Chao, put on your dancing sneakers, the ones with the pop-out wheels. * Ariel Pink invites local musicians to perform with him for the second half of his show. The first band in each touring city to e-mail Ariel Pink's tour publicist, Katy Martineau (katy@fanaticpromotion.com), will win the coveted spot. ARIEL PINK'S HAUNTED GRAFFITI With Belong and Nudity Sat/11, 10 p.m. Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th St., SF $8 advance, $10 door (415) 474-0365
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