BW: Speaking of record stores, you and R. Stevie Moore both worked at record stores, and you brought that up to Stevie as Michael Zanna one time…

AP: I never brought that up to him.

BW: I think “Michael Zanna” may have.

AP: Michael Zanna didn’t bring it up either. Michael Zanna was my Hotmail account. I had just opened a Hotmail account, and put Michael Zanna as the name because I didn’t know what this e-mail stuff was and thought, “Well, it doesn’t have to be me, because I don’t want people to know that I’m me or something like that.” It was a PO Box basically, and wrote “Michael Zanna”. Stevie asked who Michael Zanna was, and I said he was my manager. But that was it, and then it got cleared up pretty quickly after that.

BW: And Michael Zanna appears on…

AP: He appears on the song [“Stevie Pink Javascript”] because by the second or third e-mail I ever got from Stevie, it was already established that we were going to collaborate.

BW: Getting into cassette tapes and the Ariel Archives project, I wanted to address the possible confusion around the idea of the lo-fi label. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, because you’ve already expressed that you didn’t set out to make lo-fi music, but I did want to briefly touch on the ideas of hauntology, haunted graffiti, the idea evoked by a title like Worn Copy, and what you did intend when you made your earlier recordings.

AP: I never thought of myself as lo-fi. Lo-fi to me was Lou Barlow in Sebadoh, The Folk Implosion, some Dinosaur Jr…alternative music. I didn’t see what I was doing as that. I thought of it as being avant-garde, or something like that maybe. I didn’t put a label on it, but I was a fetishist about things sounding like they were from another time. The whole esthetic was wrapped up with that, I suppose, and it coincided with me using the 8-track, yielding results that could almost pass as being from a different era. It all meshed together and snowballed from there.

BW: So how much of what we’ve been hearing on the previous versions of the tracks that are being re-released for Ariel Archives is what you had in mind when you originally recorded them?

AP: None of it is what I had in mind going into it. I was just trying to make music as best I could. I didn’t know how to do it exactly, so I felt I could smudge the edges in certain respects and maybe get away with something. It was like a ruse, because for me it was like a pretend thing. I could almost pass myself off as a musician or an artist from a different era. There was a sense that I could create something mysterious because nobody knew who I was. I had anonymity going for me, could leave a lot to the listener’s imagination, and I was hoping that would create the appeal I wanted. I didn’t want to give people any kind of insight into my personality, background, or who I was. I wanted them to stumble onto it the same way that I stumbled onto my interests.

BW: On the topic of documenting, do you think there is a purpose to engaging in what we’re doing right now as I sit here with you asking you questions and having a discussion about your music? People are used to saying it’s important to do, but maybe it’s not. How do you see it?

AP: I think it’s a lot of attention on me that I don’t necessarily…on the one hand I must like the attention, but I feel like I keep circling back to the same things, and that gets a little annoying -- it’s freeze-framed. But it’s kind of what I asked for.

BW: Was it the alley wall in Highland Park that led to the concept “haunted graffiti”, or did the wall come after the idea?

AP: The haunted graffiti thing came before, in the 90s. It was before Ariel Pink. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti is the whole thing. What’s on the graffiti? When you paint over graffiti, it’s still there underneath. It hasn’t gone anywhere – you just don’t know it’s there. It’s like a ghost, a poltergeist, or something like that.

BW: So the wall in the Highland Park alley wasn’t in any way connected to that idea, because it came later.

AP: That was [just] an example that I gave – the idea of haunted graffiti is in the term. What is haunted graffiti? It was a completely arbitrary thing that I made sense of after the fact.

BW: Again, not to retread things you’ve already addressed, but just to clarify – there was a misunderstanding by some that the name “Haunted Graffiti” was a band name, when in fact it was more of a concept, right?

AP: Right – it was the whole idea of having a title for your project. Everybody’s got a band name, or [something] that’s not their name, like Slugbug or Weirdo Music Forever. Stevie [Moore] is not a good example, and neither is Gary [Wilson], but that is what I was used to doing – inventing these band names [and] projects because nobody would listen to you if you were a solo artist.

I thought “Ariel Rosenberg’s Thrash and Burn” had this thing that was me, so that was kind of like a solo thing too. But the next project was going to be “Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti”, like there was a guy named Ariel Pink, and he was presenting you this thing called “Haunted Graffiti”. [It was] sort of a kitchen sink play – a weird hobo presenting a very shabby band, where he’s like, “Behind this curtain…Haunted Graffiti!” It was a made-up scenario. The confusion was in the whole thing. It was designed to be somewhat misleading, so again, you get what you ask for.