Ariel Pink – “Mopehead”
Hey, everybody! It’s Ariel Pink! And he’s back with eight minutes of unlistenable gut-churning noise for us! Happy Friday!
Pink, the master of queasy and off-kilter quasi-pop, has always stood out for his oblique melodic instincts, and you can hear that side of him at work on Dedicated To Bobby Jameson, the album he released a year ago. But today, Pink has shared something else, and it has nothing to do with melody. Instead, the new eight-minute track “Mopehead,” which showed up on on YouTube last week and only just came to our attention, is a squalid and near-unbearable eight-minute sound collage, one made up entirely of screeching static sounds. (My six-year-old, who has a two-hour school delay today for some godforsaken reason: “Dad, that’s horrible noise! Turn it off” And I mean, he’s not wrong.)
The track’s YouTube description reveals that Pink recorded “Mopehead” in his bedroom last month. It comes with a video of grainy and patched-together found footage, which may or may not be NSFW. (I didn’t watch the whole thing.) Go ahead and test your endurance below.
Dedicated To Bobby Jameson is out now on Mexican Summer.