ŚLIZGAWKA

A singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist whose music is equally poignant and outlandish, sugary and abrasive, and as well-versed in the catchiest pop music from the '60s, '70s, and '80s as avant-garde and outsider music, Ariel Pink is an art school dropout who became one of the most influential indie musicians of the 2000s and 2010s. Recorded on an eight-track recorder that gave his music a murkily otherworldly quality, his initial albums as Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti spanned the post-punk and Krautrock hybrids of 1999's Underground, the hazy quarter-life crisis meditations of 2000's The Doldrums, and the relatively light-hearted but just as mercurial territory of 2002's Lover Boy and 2003's Worn Copy. When Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label reissued some of these early albums, Pink's acclaim and influence reached a peak, inspiring the chillwave movement as well as a lo-fi revival. However, few of his followers could approach his audacious strangeness, which remained in his later, widely released work for labels including 4AD and Mexican Summer. The slightly higher fidelity of albums such as 2010's Before Today -- the first album Pink recorded in a professional studio -- only made it easier to hear how singular his mutations of pop music were. After retiring the Haunted Graffiti project, Pink's solo albums, which included 2014's Kim Fowley collaboration pom pom and 2017's homage to the cult L.A. musician Dedicated to Bobby Jameson, continued to connect and recombine pop's history in his one-of-a-kind way...