Big news for fans of 1990s obscure music, as it has come to light that Berlin’s HEMarchiv will be remastering and reissuing Ariel Pink’s pre-Haunted Graffitti musique concrète album, Thrash and Burn, as a limited-edition, 250-copy, 4-cassette boxset.
The album, originally recorded in 1998 and released by HEM in 2006, was unleashed upon the world under Pink’s real name, Ariel Rosenberg, and is described as being “weird as shit, lo-fi if by ‘lo-fi’ you mean as unprofessional as a high school recording, and so desperately needing an editor that it sounds like an X-Men comic in the early 90s read.” That’s not a real quote, and my editor says I need to stop making things up just so I can work in X-Men references [Editor’s Note: It’s true. Kid Midnight took a gambit with that joke. Dude always goes rogue on us.].
You can stream the entire album here, or you can be COOL and actually lay down some cash for the tunes here. Or, if you’re enjoying yourself, you can just keep on reading and check out an official statement from Mr. Pink himself:
As with stored memories one has acquired early in life, Thrash and Burn survives for me less as a finished piece of music in/itself or even a moment captured in time; more a catalog of lifetimes, each piece unique and unnamed, together they recall glimpses of forgotten future-pasts; in cosmology, as one peers ever deeper into the void, first beyond the fixed population density of stars nestled in a ‘suburb’ at the outer edge of our galaxy, into an evermore all encompassing blackness surrounding a thin lane of galaxies, one heads off in one direction, floating along a lonely string of Christmas lights which recede with the distance. Much further downstream, a giant wall of light scaffolding fades into view. That is destiny’s orphan multiverse inhabiting a single frame in its infancy. In time, we would transcend it. From where we stand our footsteps recede and fade into the darkness. But our beginnings are not lost; for someone standing off and above our horizon, in a human ear much more young, the secret of our coming of age shall be preserved revealed and discovered yet once again….
• Ariel Pink: http://us.myspace.com/arielpink
• HEMarchiv: http://www.hemarchiv.org