Ariel Pink on Myspace

MP3: Gates of Zion (from the Mistletone Australian tour 7″)

Video: Gray Sunset
from the album the Doldrums. Directed by Travis Peterson. Shot in Chinatown, Los Angeles May 3rd 2008. Special thanks to Nicolas Amato, Tudor Bolloni, Kenny Brown, Stuart Cropley, Justin Corrigan, Eric Fensler, and Jay Rajeck.

Video: hilarious interview with Ariel during his Australian tour by In The Raw TV

“I try to create music that’s like a totem pole of different elements. I see myself as an experimental artist inspired by the unreality of pop” - Ariel Pink to The Guardian

After years of recording and releasing homemade cassettes in relative seclusion from his home in the hills of Los Angeles, Ariel Pink became the first non-Animal Collective member to sign to their Paw Tracks label. Since joining the Paw Tracks roster, he has won fervent cult status with a handful of amazing and hallucinatory home-made pop albums under the name Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. Recording in his bedroom with a guitar, bass, keyboard, and eight-track (the drum sounds are all unbelievably created with his mouth), Ariel Pink blends Lite FM and warped lo-fi pop into something beautiful and confusing, yet highly addictive.

“I’m the king of bad vibes,” Ariel recently told the LA Weekly. “I always wanted to make the saddest music that ever was. I’m incapable of not doing it. So I make avant-garde music using pop music. The pop quality in my music is so sad because it’s nostalgic – it is the sound of a happiness that’s not there anymore.”

“Bizarre and brilliant and infuriating” - The Weekend Australian

“In a spoilt-for-choice era overrun by soundalikes, Ariel Pink somehow manages to sound how no one else has ever dared” - The Age four-star review

“Although these albums were recorded on 8-track, their range, volatility and Simultaneist overload sounds like The Beatles circa 1967, The Human League, FM radio’s Hall Of Fame, Phil Spector, Tiny Tim and the great R Stevie Moore all frolicking at once in an acid bath in his own head”- UNCUT five-star review

“Ariel Pink is the perfect antidote to the iPod. Instead of a playlist fashioned for an audience of one, Pink’s music recreates the scene of a child falling in love with pop for the first time: ear cupped to an imperfectly-tuned transistor, plugged into an otherworldly beyond. This Los Angeles recluse is driven by contradictory impulses that mesh to make sublime noise-pop. The formalist’s love of songcraft and period stylisation (one minute he’s channelling Hall and Oates, the next Blue Oyster Cult) collides with a psychedelic urge to shatter form with kaleidoscopic chaos.”- Simon Reynolds, Observer Music Monthly