![]() ![]() “I don’t care about instrumental skill,” he says. Without the mistakes, you wouldn’t know it was really a cello.” These days, with the recording software Auto-Tune, “if he’s too in-tune, I just detune him.” Like any serious New Waver, he distrusts perfection: “I used to not allow Sam (Davol, the group’s cellist) to do multiple takes, because I wanted the mistakes. “Since I was going for chaotic sounds,” he continues, “I didn’t want keyboards, which are the apogee of control in music.” It’s not really controllable it’s good for making shrieks and static and squiggly noises. “You press your thumbs on it and complete the circuit. He wanted wild, unpredictable electronic sounds, he says, so he used devices such as the Cracklebox, a handheld toy with exposed electrical contacts. The new Magnetic Fields album, Love at the Bottom of the Sea, is dominated by Merritt’s oddball synthesizers. “I did invent the Slinky Guitar, now that I think of it. Unlike some musical tinkerers, Merritt says, “I don’t invent my own instruments, except in the sense that I’m perfectly capable of taping a Slinky to the chandelier in order to get the right sound. His musical hobby became dangerously expensive thanks to his habit of collecting obscure instruments: exotic percussion devices, stringed instruments from around the world and such oddities as the Hohner Claviola, a mouth-blown accordion so rare he thinks only about 100 were made. Since then, Merritt’s songs have consistently earned comparisons to classics by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.īut while those men could ply their trade with just a piano and writing supplies, Merritt is a hands-on experimentalist. Though he released the first Magnetic Fields record in 1991, Merritt didn’t get widespread attention until 1999’s audacious 69 Love Songs, a three-CD set of original tunes whose gems ranged from bleak comedy ( Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin) to the heartbreaking Busby Berkeley Dreams. “It went from being an expensive hobby, to interfering with my life as a journalist, to obliterating my life as a journalist.” “I really have fallen backward into being a musician,” he says. Merritt liked music journalism, mostly because he got free records. Though she is known for making terrifying music about Satan and AIDS, he recalls, she was “a very generous, sweet person.” When Merritt’s own recorder captured only 15 seconds of their discussion in 1998, Galas happily redid it over e-mail. He unfailingly says “please” and “thank you” to the waitress, he makes jokes (albeit bone-dry ones) and he’s quick to commiserate with his companion over a misbehaving audio recorder.Īfter all, Merritt used to be on the other side of the table - working as a journalist for Time Out New York and interviewing intimidating figures such as avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galas. ![]() He once said that “as an only child, I of course resent the existence of all other people.”īut over lunch at a Greenwich Village tavern a block from his apartment in New York, Merritt displays if not good cheer, then good manners. Fans circulate videos in which vapidly jovial interviewers grow uncomfortable against his unrelenting somberness. The sardonic tunesmith behind the Magnetic Fields is often called glum - his baritone is a morose moan.
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