Ariel Pink

***An absorbing look at ARIEL ROSENBERG’s early musique concrète epic. Thrash and Burn dates from a time when Ariel Rosenberg, then a few years from turning "Pink," first proclaimed himself a "20th Century Composer" without a trace of irony in his voice. Appropriately, this early work takes the form of a musique concrète epic forged from Rosenberg's late-'90s faux-primitif, garage-punk, and tape-loop experiments. At 94 minutes and 36 tracks, Thrash and Burn displays the symphonic ambitions of his genre-devouring pop saga, Haunted Graffiti, but with little in the way of fastidious album-oriented constructions. Rather, Thrash and Burn is a free-form tape ramble that uses gauzy atmospherics to strike up a wicked dialogue with the likes of Rosenberg's non-pop influences, like Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Schaeffer, and Luc Ferrari. (In particular, Schaeffer's "Symphonie pour un homme seul" seems to get plenty of nods here.) Thrash and Burn was discovered in 2005, in an ankle-deep pile of cracked cassettes and scratched CD-R's in Rosenberg's Beverly Hills flat. Grier and Rosenberg then made an initial reconstruction attempt, and Thrash and Burn became a 4-cassette box set for the inaugural release of Human Ear Music, in 2006. The Wikipedia page for Thrash and Burn places its origin sometime in 1998.