WOEBOT

ARIEL PINK
WORN COPY
PAW TRACKS

Originally released on the miniscule Rhystop Records, and now available via The Animal Collective’s imprint Paw Tracks, "Worn Copy" feels like an epoch-defining record. Furthermore one senses that with it, the recently re-released "Doldrums" and the imminently available "House Arrest and Lover Boy" (collectively forming the "Haunted Graffiti" triumvirate) Ariel Pink has engineered some unholy sonic force field which seems to threaten to cosmologically trigger events in life itself. The atmosphere about "Worn Copy" appears to duplicate the frighteningly unheimlich qualities of that surrounding Bobby Beausoleil and Charles Manson's music.

How can what sound like poorly recorded demos of early 1980s MTV out-takes pack such a punch? Ariel Pink's abandonment of sophisticated audio technology (he records onto an MT8X Yamaha cassette 8 track in preference to Pro Tools wizardry) doesn't represent a gesture of Lo-fi inspired defiance so much as unquestioning single-mindedness. It's the same total integrity of vision, which makes hearing music composed in such insular conditions not a solipsistic experience for the listener, but more akin to entering a parallel dimension. Fittingly here is a record which one can justifiably claim reveals itself after repeated listenings, one's ears acclimatise to the gloom, details such as Ariel's human-beat box drumming and the delicacies of the production become gradually apparent. It's Ariel's insistence on, to quote Baba Ram Dass, the "here and now" which contribute to the transcendental stature of tracks like "Trepanated Earth". In an act of monumental perversity he claims to be trying "to put Beverly Hills on the map", to try to forge a folk music in the gutter at the centre of the media universe. This same gutter is dramatised in Norman Klein's "History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory" as a zone of permanent amnesia produced through proximity to Hollywood.

Pink is a fantastically gifted songwriter. One can easily imagine tunes like "Life in LA", "Artifact" or "Jules lost his Jewels" recast by Billy Joel, Cindy Lauper or Ric Ocasek as perfect pop pap, yet their raw conception explicitly resists this. It's thrilling to imagine such talent fingering the corrupt edifice of the music industry, and as fascinating to imagine Bonnie Tyler and Meatloaf, not as partisans hijacking the global media machine, but as minstrels scuffling through the malls and back-alleys of the City of Angels.