About the Vinyl:

LPs housed with Obi-Strips and Printed Inner sleeves

Includes Download Card

Pressed at Record Technology, Inc.

Original Art Design by Ariel Pink

The Kitchen Club Vinyl Bundle offers exclusive and limited color editions of each of the ten albums being issued in four cycles over the course of 2019 and 2020

Mexican Summer presents Ariel Archives.

Ariel Archives is a comprehensive series of reissues and retrospective collections concentrating on the treasure trove of material recorded and released by Ariel Pink as Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti.

Releases in the Ariel Archives series will be expanded to contain much of the original material left off prior reissues that were made available in the mid-2000s and are now out of print. The first installment begins with Underground, (the inaugural album in the original Haunted Graffiti series), Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2, (a long-awaited second volume of outtakes and non-album tracks), and finally Loverboy, an exemplary disc recorded between October 2001 and July 2002, at which time Ariel also recorded House Arrest. Releases in Ariel Archives will not follow a chronological sequence, though the first installment starts at the beginning with Underground.

Ariel Archives will include definitive reissues of Ariel Pink’s albums released between 1999 and 2004: Underground, The Doldrums, House Arrest, Loverboy, Scared Famous, and Worn Copy. Surplus material from this period to the present day will be highlighted in two new volumes of collected outtakes and non-album tracks, Odditties Sodomies Vol. 2 and Vol. 3., plus a new edition of Odditties Sodomies Vol. 1. Ariel Archives will complete this retrospective project with the first-ever vinyl release of Stranded at Two Harbors (the debut Holy Shit album co-written by Matt Fishbeck and Ariel Pink) and a new collection of Ariel Pink’s singles and tour-only CD-Rs released in the last decade.

Ariel Archives makes an effort to reckon with the remarkable volume of outstanding music Ariel Pink made during this time. Rapidly evolving from crude proto-Punk experiments to an adventurous home-recording aesthetic that explored a wide continuum of Pop music, Ariel Pink developed a sound and image that would prove highly inventive and hugely influential. Early recordings by Ariel Pink mined his musical obsessions. Underground, for example, fused basic elements from Krautrock, post-Punk, and Industrial / Goth music. But soon these expressions of homage and youthful imitation lead Ariel Pink into a deep creative rabbit hole that became the genesis of the Haunted Graffiti catalogue of music.

Underground >remains an essential artifact of Ariel Pink’s early music, a favorite among fans but lesser heard among subsequent Haunted Graffiti albums that received wider release. As a collection of early recordings made while Ariel Pink was a student at CalArts they present Ariel Pink’s music in its most raw, protean form. (Ariel had made experimental home recordings earlier, during highschool, but this early noise-oriented style was mostly shelved for the melodically-driven songs Ariel conceived while at CalArts.) Underground was recorded between 1998 – 1999 using a borrowed 8-track Tascam machine from John Maus, a freshman music major who struck up a friendship with Ariel after seeing Ariel’s ramshackle band The Appleassians perform a spontaneous set of Ariel’s songs at college speakeasy event. Maus encouraged Ariel to record these songs and thus began Ariel’s exploration of the limitations and liberations of the 8-track cassette machine.

Ariel Archives looks back to this torrent of activity with the objective of uncovering even more mystifying music. Ariel Pink’s own tape archive is fortunately well preserved: extant tapes for the original albums have been retransferred and remastered for the project. Additional tracks recorded contemporaneously expand several releases in the Ariel Archives series, following not a facsimile formula but one that is faithful to Ariel’s own adaptive approach to sequencing. (Track-listings for the original cassette versions of the Haunted Graffiti albums differed from their subsequent CD-R and Compact Disc versions. Likewise, some of the albums were condensed considerably when they were first issued on vinyl. Releases in the Ariel Archives series are expanded from the 1st generation sequence when possible.)

In total Ariel Archives will include six definitive reissues of key Haunted Graffiti albums: Underground, The Doldrums, Loverboy, House Arrest, Scared Famous and Worn Copy. Two new volumes of Odditties Sodomies will appear along with a new edition of Vol. 1, previously out-of-print. Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck’s co-written album as Holy Shit, the laid back and tuneful Stranded at Two Harbors, will be released for the first time on vinyl. There will also be a new standalone collection drawn from Ariel Pink’s non-album singles and CD-Rs.