You’re going to be faced with unfortunate diversions and you’re going to have to deal with the whole of me. “Whatever entry point people have, it’s going to be a different experience. But for Pink, whose sound has been described as “time collapsing on itself”, that’s not really a concern. Just as Pink’s music deconstructs pop music’s “golden decades” – the 60s, 70s and 80s – in order to reconfigure them in increasingly anachronistic ways, not just across albums but each three-minute bizarro pop fantasy, his own back catalogue is being recontextualised even as it’s being canonised. Indeed, the Ariel Archives series, like the select Haunted Graffiti reissues that Animal Collective released through their Paw Tracks label, which helped make Pink’s name in the mid-00s, is wilfully out of step with the real chronology. It’s an unwieldy thing, and time is a bit spotty.” “One would hope that certain errors that were made at the beginning would somehow magically disappear and you could actually present the thing in chronological – or some orderly – fashion, to make things less confusing for people,” Pink tells RC, from his home in Los Angeles. For a man whose discography is as perplexing as it is expansive, now would be the time to help give it some structure. It sees The Doldrums, Worn Copy and House Arrest take their place alongside 2019’s inaugural instalment, which took in the albums Underground and Loverboy, along with a second collection in the Oddities Sodomies series. The second “cycle” of a mammoth undertaking dubbed the Ariel Archives project – he has re-released 13 albums and one collaborative project out under the Ariel Pink name, and they have recently been reissued through Mexican Summer. The man born Ariel Rosenberg, better known as Ariel Pink, is deep in the archives.

Haunted discography rare