#ryan dombal

[fionaapplerocks]

Pitchfork is being 'folded into GQ magazine' which is corporate speak for 'you are (almost) all fired'.

@jennpelly

I don't know what will happen to the Pitchfork website or Youtube channel , but now might be a good time to revisit some of the many great interviews they have done over the years.

[jacobwren]

"For all of their magnificence, collectives come at a cost; our society is set up to make them nearly impossible to build and maintain. (At Hearing Things, we know this first-hand.) In the Broken Social Scene documentary, there is footage of band members coming up with an impromptu ditty while on an early international tour. The hook: “We all lose money on European tours.” It’s a funny moment that underlines the stark financial realities of any kind of collective action. Earlier this year, the UK septet Los Campesinos! broke down precisely how they lost nearly £2,000 playing a sold-out show in Ireland. Caroline can surely relate. According to a recent Loud and Quiet profile, all of the members have day jobs and none earn a salary from the band. The cost of being a collective means Caroline have yet to announce any upcoming U.S. tour dates even though they’re signed to an established indie label, Rough Trade, and just put out one of the most acclaimed albums of 2025. “We don’t make any money,” band member Alex McKenzie said in that same profile, “and we’re all knackered all the time, because of all our jobs, but people come to our gigs and they cry and they have these emotional responses—and actually that’s pretty cool.” It is cool. But coolness doesn’t pay the bills, especially in this era. As an expansive group, Caroline turn that struggle into staggering art. It shouldn’t be so hard, though. And we shouldn’t have to wait so long for the next collective classic." - Ryan Dombal, Caroline Made the Most Life-Affirming Album of the Year So Far

[lizzygrantarchives]

Pitchfork, August 29, 2011

After getting her start in upstate New York church choirs, this sultry, Elvis-worshipping 24-year-old singer is now writing gleeful 1950s-style pop songs about murder and brooding in cut-and-paste YouTube come-ons.

Lana Del Rey is old-school Hollywood glamor meets splice-friendly YouTube culture with a fair share of coquettish attitude and smoke-parlor Stevie Nicks vocals thrown in. She became a blog concern this spring after her visual for creaking, strung-out Best New Track “Video Games” caught eyes and ears. The clip, created by Del Rey herself, shows its star pouting into her webcam as found footage of skateboarders, drunk starlets, and American flags flicker by. The juxtaposition of its seemingly-put-together singer and its DIY aesthetic proved intriguing.

Lana Del Rey is also Lizzy Grant, a 24 year old who grew up singing in several different school choirs in Lake Placid, New York, about five hours north of the city. She released an album on iTunes in January 2010 produced by vet David Kahne, known for his work with Paul McCartney, the Strokes, and Regina Spektor, among many others. The LP, dubbed Lana Del Rey, has since been deleted. “I would like people focused on my new music for now,” wrote Del Rey in an email—understandable since that record’s dusty Americana only hints at the promise of “Video Games.” And while she’s previously admitted that “managers and lawyers” helped her choose the “Lana Del Rey” moniker, she’s not a character or a studio creation. On the topic of Lizzy vs. Lana, she wrote, “There’s not a real me and another me. Same person, just a different name.”

“Video Games” and its B-side “Blue Jeans” will be released as a single October 9 digitally and a day later on limited edition 7" via Stranger. Meanwhile, Del Rey is currently working on another full-length, which is due out early next year. We recently emailed her a few questions and she answered some of them, writing about her musical beginnings, the perfection of Elvis, and why “sleeping with the boss doesn’t get you anywhere at all these days.”

How did you meet the pretty-well-known producer of your first album, David Kahne?

When I was 18 I was signed to an indie label and we sent my demos to five producers. David called us 10 minutes later and asked if we could start working the next day. We spent every day for five months on the record with Coney Island and hope as the touchstones for the sound.

What did you learn about music and the industry from releasing that album?

I learned that there’s no reason why people decide they like music when they do. Even if you’re the best singer in the world, there’s a good chance no one will ever hear you. You make a decision to keep singing or to stop. I’ve been singing in Brooklyn since I was 17 and no one in the industry cared at all. I haven’t changed a thing since then and yet things seem to be turning around for me. Perhaps the angels decided to shine on me for a little while.

Have people offered you opportunities in the music industry if you were willing to change your sound or look?

No. People have offered me opportunities in exchange for sleeping with them. But it’s not 1952 anymore. Sleeping with the boss doesn’t get you anywhere at all these days. Nobody cared about wanting to change the way I looked or sounded because no one was interested in the music.

You’ve said that managers and lawyers helped you come up with the name Lana Del Rey, which suggests that you and your music may be crafted by others. Obviously, this isn’t new—you could argue that Elvis was molded by his producers and managers—but how important is it for you to be taken seriously as an artist as opposed to a music-industry creation? Do you think those two things are even in opposition, necessarily?

I write my songs and I make my videos. Elvis had good management and that’s why he looks well-crafted but actually—other than his custom-made jump suits—he was always a gentleman, always a star, had a face like a god, and a voice like a dark angel. So he wasn’t really contrived—he was just dead cool. That’s why his legacy lives on, because he was actually perfect.

Your dad is a successful domain investor, but I read that you were living in a trailer park a few years ago. Do you fetishize that trailer park lifestyle?

My dad is an entrepreneur and an innovator. Being an entrepreneur doesn’t make you a rich tycoon and being an innovator doesn’t mean that you’re successful. It just means that you’re interesting. No one cares that I lived in a park—Dad loves trailers and is getting one in the Everglades. My first record label gave me a small check and I moved into a park near Manhattan. It’s not something I cared to even share but people keep asking me about it. My songs are cinematic so they seem to reference a glamorous era or fetishize certain lifestyles, but that’s not my aim. I’m not trying to create an image or a persona. I’m just singing because that’s what I know how to do.

You started singing in a church choir—do you think your church would approve of some of the lyrics on “Kinda Outta Luck” like the one about hitting dudes in the back of the head with a gun?

God has saved me a million times so I think he must’ve enjoyed that song.

Originally published on pitchfork.com.

[framing-the-picture]

...the record's signature clattering percussion-- including thigh slaps, truck stomps, and "pillow," according to the credits...

Pitchfork’s review of Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel...

[benxsamuel]

“What’s always set Clark apart is his eclecticism, dynamism, and flair for the dramatic, all of which is on fine display here. His tracks don’t drop as much as they slip or swerve, forever off-balance. He’ll end a techno album with eight minutes of beatless, sky-cracking ecstasy you’d expect to find on a Sigur Rós LP, and it will make sense. He’s allergic to the idea of standard sounds and presets, which is partly why we’re still talking about him 13 years after his debut. And unlike many of his more insular peers, Clark can be open to sentimentality—not schmaltz as much as a belief in humanness and all its inexact wonder. In electronic music’s never-ending battle between man and machine, he’s seeking a third way. “It's just far too easy these days,” he said in an interview earlier this year, talking about the copy-and-paste replicability of so much modern composition. “I'm often inspired by the path of most resistance. Looking for those tiny snippets of error—machines being pushed into areas of behavior that seem wrong and unusable. There is real fruit there.” 

Rather than fighting the SoundCloud hivemind with real people playing real instruments, à la Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, he composed Clark largely on a computer by himself in a barn in the middle of the English countryside, cracking codes and inflicting glitches. As computerized watches and glasses inch toward ubiquity, this idea of subverting machines to make them more human seems like a particularly worthy preservation strategy—and nobody does that quite like Clark. Yes, he makes music that sounds like the end of the world. But he also makes you want to live long enough to see what that will look like.”

- From Ryan Dombal's Pitchfork review of Clark’s self-titled LP

[perfectmidnightworld]

Check out the Pitchfork cover story on Tom Krell and his brilliant new How to Dress Well album, "What is This Heart?". 

Story by Ryan Dombal // Photos by Erik Sanchez

[carneebatatas]

"It just makes me feel weird, and it doesn't really help anybody else. I mean, I don't take selfies. It makes me feel empty inside to take a picture of myself at an event, like, 'Isn't my life cool?'" Clark refuses to Google herself, too, for good reason. "The last time somebody showed me something on there, it was some fucking freak ejaculating onto my Actor record cover," she says, still grossed-out. "I'm just like, 'I really didn't need to see that.' I have enough actual things to worry about other than the conjecture."

Annie Clark for Pitchfork by Ryan Dombal | February 17, 2014.

[groovesnjams]

The Chain: Labyrinth

"Like many Manhattan iconoclasts before him, Hynes holds director Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary of NYC gay and transgender ball culture, Paris Is Burning, very dear. While everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga has taken inspiration from these events—one of the few safe havens for participants to revel in their true selves without having to worry about the judging eyes of society—they often focus on their more outrageous or empowering aspects (see: "Vogue"). But Dev Hynes' music is more suited to the film's beautiful and wrenching quiet moments, like when transgender model Octavia Saint Laurent confesses her desire to "be somebody" or is seen worshipping cut-outs of supermodels taped to the walls of her bedroom. The message comes full-circle on the Michael Jackson demo of a closing ballad, "Time Will Tell", which repurposes some of Hynes' own lines while a refrain of "and it keeps on running back" underlines the repetition. Gay, straight, man, woman, black, white, or anywhere in between: Heartbreak is real. It won't stop."

From Ryan Dombal's Review of Cupid Deluxe by Blood Orange

"Some people message me things like, "I really need you right now." I'll wake up in the middle of the night with a Direct Message notification from my Twitter and I'll be up all night talking to them and telling them, "It's alright. You're going to feel trapped and lost and all these things, but the most important thing to remember is that the only way out of the labyrinth is straight and fast. That is the way through. That's it."

From Scott Neumyer's interview of Angel Haze

"“Then your life bifurcated?” I asked in her kitchen. I was referring, specifically, to the release of her first album, but I meant more generally. She did not know “bifurcate,” and now I wasn’t sure it was right, so I went into the living room and got one of her dictionaries: “to divide into two branches or forks.” She said yes, this was what happened. Her OCD exploded. She could not be alone. New York, as a place, terrified her. "

From Dan P. Lee's profile of Fiona Apple