The word “nostalgia” gets thrown around quite a bit. As a concept, it can be unstable; and, as a tool, quite harmful. Questioning and examining the interrelationship between past and future — as it’s mediated through the present — is a core tenet of the most recent album from New York–based artist Arp, appropriately titled New Pleasures.
Alexis Georgopoulos has been releasing music as Arp since 2007. New Pleasures — an all-new 11-track instrumental album — abounds with rich sonic textures, featuring a host of vaunted analog synthesizers and drum machines including the Sequential Prophet-5, Yamaha DX7, Linn LM-1, and Oberheim DMX, just to name a few. Georgopoulos draws from numerous genres, ranging from bossa nova and Balearic beat to New Wave, ’70s Italo disco, post-punk, and more.
This is to say nothing of how New Pleasures builds on the even broader amalgamation of genres and sounds he’s explored throughout his discography, generating a conceptual through line in his evolving catalog. New Pleasures is the second entry in a planned trilogy (more on that later), which shares its name with the first album in the series, ZEBRA. Despite the range of historic influences, the album exudes a crisp, modern polish, situating it in a space between sampling and interpolation. This juxtaposition represents the larger questions and ideas in which the album deals: why do we like these things from the past? What makes them good? What do they mean in the here and now, abstracted and stripped from their original (and now-comfortable) context?
The old order may be dead or dying, but its decaying remains nurture the soil from which its nascent, unproven replacement grows. According to Alexis, New Pleasures has a two-pronged thesis: to be an optimistic listen, soundtracking ideas of experiences that could transport you anywhere on the musical map, and to challenge you by adding a little uneasiness to the familiar references. More importantly, it asks you to find your own answers to the questions that form while enjoying the tunes on their own musical merits. As our discussion covered everything from contemporary economics to the neuroscience of dreaming, it feels only natural to start at the beginning.
Music, Access, and the Sonic Commodity
Consumption and consumerism are prominent themes on New Pleasures, but the title has a second meaning of things not just being categorically new but of old pleasures reexamined under a new light. Contrast and juxtaposition are also useful terms for understanding Arp’s thesis with New Pleasures. His aural assemblage of Western musical references from the past 50 years presents a perfect way to challenge listeners to reconsider the comforts of the musically familiar.
Jacob Fehlhaber: The press release for New Pleasures called it “your most accessible album, to date,” which I found to be a very interesting choice of words.
Arp: Oh, how so?
Well, “accessibility” is a very slippery word. In the sense of saying that this has more in common with what might be considered “popular,” I can see how “accessibility” might be a term we’d employ. Though, I can also understand that accessibility might invite an intellectualization of music that’s specifically inaccessible by intention.
If you continue to elaborate a little, I think I’m getting what you’re saying. Can you go a little further?
Sure. I’m thinking about the democratization of music and music making over the last 30 years, and especially with DAWs becoming so ubiquitous. You buy a Mac, and it’s got GarageBand on it, and how many people have made hit songs with GarageBand?
Right.
So, “accessibility,” in a technology-laden musical landscape, is a much different concept than asking, “Was musique concrète considered ‘accessible’ when it was happening in the ’40s and ’50s?”
Sure, yes, making music has become much more accessible, much more democratic in that sense, there’s no doubt. What’s come with that is saturation. There’s simply so much music being made. The question then leads to how all that music is going to be heard or if it’s going to be heard at all. So, the avenues we each have access to — are we part of a community in the real world or online that turns us on to music? Or do we simply engage as passive listeners/consumers by accepting or liking what’s programmed on the radio or online radio platforms or algorithmic playlists?
My sense is the accessibility mentioned in the press release defines “accessibility” in terms where, in relationship to music I’ve released in the past — say, a 30-minute drone piece [laughs] like “Raga for Moog and Violin,” New Pleasures is more “traditionally approachable” in a broad sense. If someone finds a 30-minute drone more accessible, that simply has everything to do with the listener! [laughs]
The term “accessibility” may simply be, when you really get down to it, like you say, a word that comes with baggage. A word that’s historically been defined in relation to commerce.
It’s interesting that you draw that line because now, more than ever, the difference between those things is pretty blurry.
Absolutely.
You can look up virtually anything online, and how palatable it is to any one person doesn’t really have any bearing on how they access it.
Sure, if a seven-minute track of lightly pulsing arpeggios is more accessible to a listener than a track that uses a pop-song format with drums, bass, melodic synths, I certainly have no issue with that. Ambient music has — in response to an increasingly frenetic, stressful world and via the popularity of algorithmic streaming playlists — become quite accessible. The audience for ambient music has really grown. But I’d guess the press release is discussing what I believe is a sense of baseline approachability.
When and where drums were present and how present they were — this felt very deliberate as I worked through the album. I had a note alluding to this idea of the drums having a more conventional or approachable pattern as something that bridges this gap between what’s accessible and what’s not. It really spotlights the role that rhythm plays and the very percussive orientation we have to rhythm in music.
It’s interesting how few people have made the observation you’ve just made. If you listen, you’ll notice that, on the first two or three records, there are basically no drums or drum machines. With maybe a few exceptions, the role of rhythm is played entirely by tonal synths or by cello, not by drum machines. Anyway, yes, you’re right: For me, if I’m going to use drums, then the drums are going to play an integral role. And, yes, perhaps the mere presence of drums creates that elusive sense of approachability we’ve been discussing! [laughs]
Sure.
At the end of the day, whether accessible or not, I suppose one of my ambitions is to make as diverse of a body of work as possible. Not simply for its own sake — for the sake of diversity, philosophically, though I do like this idea — but because I want to push myself to try new things, to not simply do what I do well but to push myself to break habits. I suppose to make myself uncomfortable to see what might happen.
Reference Versus Reverence: When Does Style Become Identity?
The question of what makes music or art “accessible” is, at one level, a matter of personal taste, but it’s also deeply woven into a broader cultural mesh of how people collectively engage with capital-M “Music.” New Pleasures expertly threads the needle between “reference” and “reverence,” prompting us to ask when something stops being a reference and becomes a creative crutch.
Sampling is a common target for this debate. Say what you will about Lil Nas X and his breakout track “Old Town Road,” but it’s hard to deny that producer YoungKio’s use of a Nine Inch Nails sample to make a country-trap beat is anything short of inventive. To release a remix with country music’s prodigal son, Billy Ray Cyrus, only upped the ante on how self-aware it could be, taunting critics and detractors.
Conversely, other producers have made their careers on the back of directly sampling and replaying the well-known works of popular artists.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross encouraged the use of their material to inspire others. Producers who directly sample works may pay sizable fees to license their samples, presumably knowing the references are already “safe” and, therefore, likely profitable. Whether you think sampling is a creatively dubious decision isn’t really the point, but the fact that we might debate this at all demonstrates how quickly influence and inspiration can move from tools of education to something bordering on plagiarism.
As New Pleasures sails through its run time, there’s a peculiarity to its musical allusions. Take the introductory track, “The Peripheral,” as an example. Swelling synth brass is underscored by elements that resemble chiptune while the atmosphere expands and percussion, soaked in delay, migrates through the mix. Still, more synthesizers emerge, taking on drone-like qualities that might have more in common with the anthemic introductions of ’70s and ’80s rock tracks (Jefferson Starship’s “Awakening” comes to mind). The heavier drums are jungle-like and possibly bit crushed, fusing “natural” and “synthetic” elements in just one instrument and in a way that feels very in line with the creative horizons of the 1980s. Despite all this, it never feels like it’s trying to be anything other than itself.
Would it be fair to say that there’s any kind of “guiding hand” on diversifying your work?
On some level, I suppose I’m questioning the idea of the artistic trademark, which carried through most of the 20th century — the idea that an artist develops a trademark style, recognizable as such, and that is the mark of your artistry. I’m not saying by any means this is an invalid idea but rather that perhaps there might be more than one way of pursuing that.
Are you alluding to a post-structural kind of view rather than a binary pairing?
I don’t know if I’d define it in those specific terms, but that is an interesting question. Ultimately, intuition always provides the impetus for something. And then, later, I understand it — sometimes years later. I try to trust that there are “reasons” for what I do. But I try to allow those reasons to reveal themselves to me in their own time. And, sometimes, the closer we are to something, the harder it is to see.
I feel like there are a lot of concerns with totality in music and bodies of work, where people want to draw distinct lines on who’s doing what. Like, “If you’re going to do this kind of music, then you should do it under a different name because you’re cultivating this crowd that expects X and you want to do Y.” Maybe that’s a bit oversimplified, but there’s something compelling about that in contrast to the prospect of diversity.
Yes, certainly. To “brand” yourself, we are absolutely encouraged to do one thing. If something catches, we’re taught to go with that. At the end of the day, I love music; and, when it comes down to my heroes, a handful of them were incredibly versatile. They could go from an academic context to a pop context; they could score a film or present work as an installation. Those are the kinds of people that have always been heroes to me. Some of them had lucrative (financially speaking) careers; some of them had rough patches or never crossed over to mainstream success.
Form Versus Function: Interfacing with Everything, All at Once
Throughout his career, Arp has worked alongside luxury brands, installation artists, fashion designers, and sculptors, featuring in projects that have found homes in the permanent collections of institutions and universities around the world. Moreover, he’s collaborated with numerous musicians to continue expanding his oeuvre, touching on spaces of film, commerce, fine art, clubs, history, and more. Aggregating these “experiences as influences” and blending them into his own arsenal of works as something that simultaneously extends from this orbit and still stands on its own is a delicate task. We don’t just interface with musical references but all media as it’s continually tailored to our on- and offline activities, which invariably loops back through to our creative efforts. New Pleasures distills this convoluted web of demi-virtual experiences into a representation of the very experiences these inspire.
Working with Apple, Bottega Venetta, or Uniqlo and then with an installation artist like Doug Aitken or a multimedia artist like Grace Hartnett, and then having work that’s in the permanent collection at MoMA — it takes a very particular type of person, and artist, to successfully navigate in, around, and through these spaces.
Ultimately, it comes down to wanting to work with people and being open to trying new things. Scoring things by commission — whether in gallery, film, or commercial contexts — brings different things to my practice. Assuming I appreciate the direction, I like being asked to try certain specific things, to conjure this atmosphere or to react to something. One of the things that drew me to New York were the stories about choreographers working with composers or painters working with writers. That kind of thing has always been exciting to me. So, though commercial work is a touchy area, I do try to be thoughtful about who I work with, and, at the end of the day, I feel lucky to be able to work and collaborate with people across media.
The multidisciplinarity?
Yeah, yeah.
Revisiting this question of “Did I go deep enough on this concept or this album?” and then moving forward: Is that framing distinguished between your work up to ZEBRA and the decision to make ZEBRA into a trilogy? Is there more forward planning with a trilogy than if you’re going case by case?
It could really apply to any of the records I’ve made. But the decision to make a trilogy just made sense on a few different levels. People can be like, “Oh what’s Arp up to this time?” So, creating a block of three records is a way of connecting the dots. The connections, I hope, won’t be super obvious. But I don’t think things should be entirely obvious at first. The third one, which I’m in the middle of now, may be the most extreme of the three.
The most unlike the others?
Hard to say, as it’s still being written. It’s important that there’s cohesion, but I think that the things that define New Pleasures won’t be what define the next chapter. My goal is to create this larger thing that works independently, where you can take each piece on its own. Then, if you care to think about what connects the three parts, hopefully there will be a compelling through line.
It seems there’s a very “form and function” limitation to consider when you’re restricted to what you have access to. There was a statement in the press release that “New Pleasures offers the building blocks of something liberating rather than didactic.”
Well, I think that sentence might be intended to provoke thought, to try to bridge the intuitive and the intellectual, instead of seeing them as entirely separate. Though ideas about commerce, autonomy, economy, etc. were very much in my mind as I made the record, the music is fairly optimistic. I would never call it dogmatic or didactic. Can we dance and also think? I hope so! [laughs]
Engagement Versus Ownership: You Can’t Just Collect Your Hobbies
No matter your interests, it’s safe to say we’ve all engaged in some form of collecting our hobbies: avid readers buying books that sit on shelves, musicians acquiring gear that never gets used, artists finding resources that will never take form. There are typically good intentions behind these, but they have a supplementary value that exists outside their intended purposes. They are symbolic evidence of our interests that also serves as a vector of adjacency to remind ourselves that we’re not just actors on the stage of our hobbies.
Allusions and references often hint at the idea of what they represent. A track like “Traitor” picks up on some ’70s Franco or Italo disco in the spirit of Don Ray or Cerrone, sporting bass lines on synths and a fretless bass whose infectious groove can’t help but make you want to wiggle à la the Brothers Johnson. In other ways, the percussion dances around the mix, recalling elements of 1980s TV cop shows. To you, it may represent none of those things, but that’s the beauty of it; stylistic homage is as much a subjective and individual feeling as it is an undeniable, macroscopic reality. There’s something going on that is both clearly culled from the past yet decidedly present.
Listening to “Le Palace,” I had written a note that just said, “techno-melancholic soundtracking as disco.”
Mmm! Mmm, that’s great, yeah.
I hope that’s picking up on the energy there.
Really, my favorite responses to the music are just when people speak freely about their experience and it’s not overinformed by what a magazine might tell them is happening, you know? Le Palace was a French club in the late ’70s/early ’80s, and I read an interview with a woman who worked the door at the club.
It was an Interview Magazine article, right?
Exactly. It’s really worth a read. Anyways, the day I read it, it hit me in the right way. Honestly, I got the drum machine going, and, while I was still reading the article, I’d get inspired and start laying down a piece, and then I continued to read the interview. For whatever reason, that day, the mood of that piece was what I imagined it might feel like at the club for a few moments. You never know where inspiration might strike.
There’s this juxtaposition that feels like early in the evening — I think that’s what you said — but it’s atmospherically somewhere a bit more elusive, this kind of 4AM twilight hour.
Yeah, the tempos are more early evening. The kids are really loving the 130–135 bpm stuff in a club context. Compared to that, a 112 or 108 track is much slower. Of course, if you’re at an all-night party, after people have been playing the bangers, you slow it down. Suddenly, 108 can be an incredibly effective tempo, between three and five or four and six in the morning. On some level, I’m always thinking about an idea of a scene. When I start making a track, I start visualizing, and images start appearing in my mind. Or there’s maybe even a fragrance in the air. That’s when a track starts feeling really alive. I’ve noticed I tend to think a bit like that. I tend to think of a scene and a track working together and the album, as a whole, like a collection of different scenes that hopefully add up to something.
While listening to New Pleasures, and with the rest of your catalog, I found that the words “soundtrack,” or “soundtracking,” or “scoring,” all came to mind. It felt like something was happening. Like I’m in the middle of something, yet I’m also kind of conjuring what that thing is in my own mind as I hear it. There’s a larger scope of experience that’s being refined to just the audio layer but still feels like it’s a part of something larger.
As you were saying that, it occurred to me that I was having a conversation with somebody where I noticed that we tend to think, unsurprisingly, in a binary way about foreground versus background. In the past, when somebody referred to your music as “background,” it was usually a slight. But what you’re describing is actually something in between the two, and that’s what I’m interested in. Something that can go from foreground to background and back. In a sense, what you just described strikes me as being maybe a third ground.
Like an “interground” of some kind?
Yeah, yeah. I like how you put it that, when you’re listening, you feel like something is happening. And that’s exciting to me. I don’t tend to think in cinematic terms about a song. It’s not necessarily about film; it’s more about a concentrated moment.
The Horizon Versus the Edge: What Now?
The specter of the past is constantly haunting the present with “imagined futures.” This phrase surfaces quite a bit in the language surrounding New Pleasures, and it captures an important juxtaposition that Arp delivers via genre and time bending across the album’s 11 tracks. The interrogation of time and linearity is another touchstone of the album’s ambitions — exploring the “multidirectional nonlinearity of memory,” in Arp’s words. When we are presented with a culture of endless references from all over the past century, we’re left with very little to attribute to the present. What does it mean to be present when our attention is constantly pulled in so many directions?
This prompted a bit of a tangent in our conversation. I recalled to him a study I once read about people born almost completely blind who had undergone surgery to be given an optical implant that activated some level of visual processing. Nobody came out with 20/20 vision or anything, but every patient remarked that the biggest shift was that the existence of vision — a previously unknown unknown — had radically altered the way they interacted with the world. “In front” or “ahead,” as concepts of physical and mental orientation, had never previously existed to them. This caused their broader worldview to suddenly feel much more closed off. At the time, I couldn’t pin down why, but this idea of “soundtracking” and “scene setting” that accompanies Arp’s creative process seemed deeply interconnected to the study’s implications on perspective.
Going back to what you were saying about people who gained their sight: Think about dreaming and how nonlinear dreaming is. Maybe that’s partly because, when your eyes are closed, dimension stretches so far. Did you ever see that movie Under the Skin?
With Scarlett Johansson, right?
Yeah! When she’s walking into that thing . . . there is a horizon line — and this is maybe a stretch with the comparison — but it comes to mind when almost the entire screen is pitch black. You don’t know how far it goes. It could go back 10 feet or 10 million feet. In the same sense, when our eyes are closed, there is no linearity because dimension stretches near or far. I think that statement . . . I like it better interpreted in that way and less about style. Our memory, with the way that our minds work — we’re constantly changing tenses. For example, you and I are trying our best to be in the present moment, but, as I speak, your mind might start drifting and think, “Oh, right, I think I need to . . . did I water my plants? Did I feed the cat?” Or maybe something I say reminds you of something your mother told you, I don’t know, 20 years ago. The mind is constantly flickering backwards and forwards to imagined futures, to fears and worries, and I think that we tend to see and think in a very linear way about stylistic references. “Oh, well that points to that decade in this year and that artist,” and, yes, that’s true. I think if we try to not do that and try to go beyond that, then maybe the nonlinearity speaks to the way that our mind works.
Present Versus Presence: Being Here Now
Considering the album as an assemblage of styles outside time helps to untangle the messy threads that connect stylistic signifiers to their associated eras, and New Pleasures becomes a conduit for reorienting ourselves. More so than other platforms, music lends itself to escapes of all fashions, and the current state of things is inevitably difficult for many people for many reasons. In all the ways New Pleasures challenges the listener, its greatest may be to get you to take stock of what it means to be in the present. To “be here now,” as Ram Dass so succinctly put it.
Maybe we overintellectualize things. Look at where we are, historically — all the concerns and scary, scary futures we’re looking at. I think the dominant culture has overemphasized reason. We’ve separated the brain from the rest of the body. The work and the art and music and things that I like the most do stir my mind; they do make me think. But that’s not necessarily what I love about them. At the end of the day, you could put this record on, and you could like it or dislike it. In a way, that’s the most important thing, and what we’re talking about I do find interesting. But I do wonder if it’s easier to talk about intellectual things, such as references or topical matters, and it’s harder to talk about songs as the very ethereal, hard-to-describe things that they are.
Right, the sort of ineffability of the feeling of experiencing it.
Yeah, exactly. Yes.
The consideration that there are these various ways of pointing toward different aspects of culture and semi-recent history and re-presenting them through this contemporary lens is compelling. I feel like having the music be very clear, very crystalline, helps to drive that point home in a way that I’m not sure would succeed without it. Was that a deliberate decision?
I think it was. I wanted things to shine, almost like a vacuum-sealed product. With a track like “Sponge (for Miyake),” for example, I was imagining the opening synth melody almost sounding like a public service announcement in a mall or in a . . .
Like Muzak played at a Kmart?
Yeah but played in a luxury store. I wanted it to evoke, with each track representing a different scene, something like a modern dance choreography happening at a high-end perfume counter. I mean, the beat is really weird. There are these delays set up on the snares and the claps that create this slapback effect, and the whole track really stemmed from that initial delay setting and this kind of elastic strangeness. Going back to what you were saying: I wanted it to shine and have this sort of sheen because that’s part of this investigation into the allure of products, and the allure of the selling lifestyle, and the allure of the consumer experience.
Right, it seems like there are a lot of considerations of conspicuous consumption.
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, but also commenting, look, even those of us who ask ourselves difficult questions about why we buy do get lured in by things. This era of capitalism is so good at creating these niche little things that appeal to any kind of person. I wanted to have a sort of tongue-in-cheek look at that, also trying to create dance contexts where, while you’re dancing, maybe you’re nodding your head and you’d think, “Huh, there’s a strange consumer experience happening here, like . . . what’s happening?”
It threads the needle very carefully. There are all these hyper-niche ways that consumption is presented back to us but also the realization that we can’t just be outside of the current system.
Yeah but, at the same time, that is a legitimate question that I am trying to learn about, myself. A lot of the things that I’ve been reading these past few years, and want to read, do question that very thing. I really think we should be asking ourselves these things. There’s a sense that capitalism seems as natural to people as though it’s the only way things could ever be, and I think it’s important to try to ask if that’s true.
Analog Versus Digital: The Ghost in the Machine
Remember earlier, when Alexis mentioned that how approachable music might be is rooted in the “palette of instrumentation” used to make it? Think about our associations between instrument and output and how context transforms our perceptions of things: Ian Anderson’s once-novel use of the flute, playing for Jethro Tull; Metallica’s performance with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on S&M; Roger Troutman’s use of the talk box in early Zapp & Roger club gigs to mesmerize patrons. I could go on, but the contextual use of the instrumentation and the sounds it creates are the intersection of form and function where New Pleasures lives.
“Drawing on the promise of futurism” is another murky phrase that came up a lot. Not to be so intellectually heavy-handed, but is that a sort of . . . hauntological consideration?
I suppose . . . hmm. Yes. In a general sense, yes. Speculative fiction writers like Ursula Le Guin and William Gibson . . . well, Gibson more so. He tends to look at the near future, but it’s littered with things from the near past. I think that this record is trying to look at the near past and how it’s informed the near future.
I’d say instrumental music is very uniquely equipped to tackle that. I’d hazard to say that, with lyrical content, there’s a risk of it being prescriptive. You only have so much space for interpretation when the words are there, even if it’s a lot of space. It’s still finite.
Right, I think that’s true, and I think that, with music, it’s that ineffability that we were talking about earlier, that music can do that in ways that, I would guess, no other art form can.
We’ve talked a lot about this role of contrast and juxtaposition and pulling things in and out of time. My understanding is that you used a lot of analog gear for this. Was that deliberate as far as the goal of the album is concerned?
No. Typically, I start getting the general direction of a record when I choose the palette of instruments. With this one, I noticed that I had really been drawn to a lot of records that used a Prophet-5. For whatever reason, over and over, I’d ask a friend of mine who knows about every synth around, “Can you tell what this sound is?” and he’d say, “Sounds like a Prophet-5.” Then, I’d ask another friend about another record, and so that became, very early on, the first instrument that I knew would play a prominent role on the record. Then, I wanted to create continuity with ZEBRA, so the marimba had to be in there at least a little bit. And the Moog — the Minimoog has been on every record I’ve ever made — so that’s always there. I knew I wanted to have a fretless bass song. Where ZEBRA had a sort of cosmic-jazz element, I knew I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted to get into those post-punk fretless territories. That music can definitely veer into cheese, no doubt, but it can also be really cool because the instrument itself sounds incredible. So, it was a combination of the records where I heard a certain sound and the production style in the years they were made. I also realized that, when I think of sci-fi music, for whatever reason, I think of a certain strain of post-punk or music made in the early ’80s. After punk blew off the conventions of music, there was such a free moment. It’s been mythologized for many years, but I still think there’s so much music made in that time that’s really hard to define. It gets lumped in with post-punk, but that could mean anything, really. Ultimately, it was the palette of instruments that defined the record, and that combination of instruments tended to be used in a certain time period only.
I think I read there was a DX7 in the mix.
Yeah, a DX7, exactly; those were simply the newest technological advances that had happened at the time. That and the Prophet-5 were massive steps, but they also happened to have incredible character in very different ways. I’m definitely not the only person using those synths, but I do think that the harmonics you’re able to get with those synths is very special. So, that was one thing I wanted to explore, and, honestly, if you just take those two synths and a fretless bass, it automatically reminds you of very specific things. I was willing to go with that because I thought the records that used that combination are still pretty cool records.
Agreed, and it’s curious to me how universally people recognize that general sound, but what that recognition means to them is so subjective. That opens a very fertile ground for interpretation while also having a bit of a guiding hand that is very aware of its thematic construction without trying to be prescriptive.
Yeah, right, not at all. One of the things I’ve always envied about filmmakers is that you can do a period piece, and somebody doesn’t necessarily call you “retro,” you know? If Stanley Kubrick does Barry Lyndon, nobody is saying, “Oh, you’re escaping reality; you’re not confronting your time.” No, it’s actually using that time period very specifically because it reflects upon now in a specific way.
It’s a form of contrast or illustration by contrast.
Mhmm, exactly.
Since we were talking about the palette of instruments and the process of making this album, is there a sort of embodied cognition? To the extent that you’re physically interfacing with this hardware when you could get something like Arturia soft synths and play any iconic synthesizer under the sun.
I believe in polyfidelity, analog or digital. The key should be making music with whatever gear you have. In a way, the evolution of my records, the instruments I’ve been able to obtain or have access to . . . I didn’t let it stop me on In Light when I had two synths and that’s it. I ported to a 4-track cassette because I didn’t even know how to use a computer at the time. You should just make music with whatever you have. I don’t really have a purist attitude about something like Arturia’s Fairlight CMI versus the real thing. Unless you’re one of like 20 people who has a real one, it’s not even going to be possible. At the end of the day, the music speaks for itself. You can use all soft synths or all analog and make a good or bad record either way.
When I first listened to New Pleasures, I had to use a format that laid out the songs with the waveform of each one as part of the interface. As an experience, it coincidentally tied into the commodity questions you’re exploring here: how, on the one hand, there’s a clear fluidity to the album yet this visualization “silos” the tracks as discrete entities, commodifying them more. It was an unexpected reflection of themes.
The thread that I hope to strike is one where one can be critical of the commodity experience but also experience joy. In other words, why can’t we dance while also being aware that we’re living a life where there’s constantly an attempt to exploit us at every turn? Why can’t we also dance and laugh about that and feel emotional about that? Can we do that?
Promises, Promises: Scrying the Past in Search of the Future
By and large, Arp’s New Pleasures is at once a scathing critique of the hyper-layered nexus of contemporary consumption and an infectious, groovy record full to the brim with hallmark synths and expertly articulated sound design, oozing with mood. A 2010 article in SFGate — an online offshoot of the San Francisco Chronicle — profiled another project of Alexis Georgopoulos, the Alps, reviewing their 12-inch EP Easy Action, claiming they had “crafted the perfect soundtrack for a lazy, hazy San Francisco day.” In the same piece, Alexis described the ideal listening experience for their music as “driving in a convertible through the desert.”
This idea of “soundtracking” can be taken many ways, and it clearly runs very deep with Alexis and his musical output as Arp (and otherwise). An integral question remains: If the siren’s nostalgic song twists our influences into an infinite soundscape of references out of time, then what do we do? What does it mean to make music in the present when competing cultural artifacts make “presence” so difficult?
Treating the past like a crystal ball — peering into its mirrored surface, reflecting all history at once, in an act of divination — feels like a natural intersection of making sense of our own interests and influences, searching for inspiration. Unfortunately, the temptation to do so is always thwarted by our ever-changing presence in an always-evolving present.
Rather than a window connecting past and future, the present is, individually, a prism, refracting the creative forces through us while we, as individuals, are in a constant state of flux. To be present and avoid the lure of nostalgia is to recognize and confront the fact that reality is not a static state of being, that the work we do and the music we create is always already an amalgamation of past, present, and imagined futures. New Pleasures boldly attempts to capture the ethos of that shared human experience. The degree to which it succeeds is largely up to you, but that’s kind of the point, right? No matter your tastes, Arp succeeds in proposing the challenge of owning our reality and turning it into something artistic we can enjoy and be proud of on its own terms — a gauntlet we’d all do well to take up.