BW: I’ve pronounced your name "Ariel" [said with long “A”] in the past, but the correct pronunciation is Ariel [ɛəɹiəl/"aerial"], right?

AP: There’s no correct pronunciation. I’ll use both at different times and in different ways.

BW: You’ve said before that the idea of “Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti” was a joke where the punchline got lost. How do you interact with the name Ariel Pink these days?

AP: The joke part wasn’t that my whole thing was shtick. It was a sort of fantasy land that was concocted, but it wasn’t a joke. I’ve always been extremely serious about the work, and I really did want to escape into a different universe, convey that to other people, and invite them to lose themselves in it.

But the joke part I was referring to had to do with my earliest interviews. Interviewers asked what kind of music I was into, and I would say “pop.” When I was saying “pop music,” I was saying it tongue-in-cheek, because the word “pop” wasn’t used in any kind of way in magazines at the time.

It’s way different now that it has a renewed definition, and “pop” has lost its actual meaning. It’s still around in one sense, to describe what’s popular out there, but The Strokes were not saying that they were listening to pop music when they were describing their influences. It was almost a knock – not even a thought for most musicians. The White Stripes, Interpol, music media, and Mojo magazines were not discussing things as “pop," - that was the last thing they wanted to think about. So I was saying I was into pop stuff as a cheeky way of saying something along the lines of "I’m an experimental musician and a pervert at the same time." I like things that are pop, and I meant it in a way that was used at one time for a specific kind of music, but was later understood as a genre of music.

So now all of a sudden, “pop” has a totally different connotation. Pop music can either mean “Rihanna” or it can also mean 80s radio music that was popular [back] then. A lot of my music taps into that 80s sound, which for me has nothing to do with the 80s. It has to do with my earliest memories, which just happen to be rooted in the 80s. And that’s what I’m always returning to in my process - my first experiences. My first experiences with music were otherworldly to me, and I constantly try to return to that.

That just happens to be the era that I grew up in – it’s not a retro excursion into a genre or a genre exercise. For me, I will always be going back to the earliest memory, and so it will be a muddled return to the very start of the 80s, and also a confluence of things that came before it and informed it, and not much happening after it. I want my experimental path that I’ve carved out for myself to take me sideways, and not really progress. It might sound cleaner from one album to the next and it might be recorded better, but it’s all about staying somewhere, and not about the progress. There are very few updates to the sound. It’s my own sideways development. That way, I can do something completely different and be on a different path, and I can stay somewhere against the tides of change where I don’t need to anticipate them, change with them, update the sounds, or get with the program fashion-wise. That’s not part of my plan. It just happens to be that the world got on my plan a little bit, or maybe it was a right time/right place zeitgeist kind of thing, and it got some sort of awareness and notoriety because of the medium of the internet, which re-invoked these old spirits that had been dead.

I think that those movements fall under my highfalutin, highly cerebral approach to music. It’s all very composer-like and professor-like. I don’t have much emotion about it, and I don’t really want to do anything or say anything [with it]. I don’t want to be a Bob Dylan; I just want to do my craft and not have it analyzed by everybody. I know it doesn’t seem like I mind talking about, but it is difficult talking about this. I’m talking about it to you because I have a feeling you might actually understand what I’m saying.