Photograph courtesy of Sebastian Mlynarski
As a kind of musical itinerant, David Pajo always seems to have his eye on another hitching post. Right now his gaze is trained on a good one.
"I would very much like to collaborate with Sunn O)))," says the man with an imprint on some of the more memorable rock releases of the past 25 years. In Slint, he helped invent new angles on riffs and minor chords, napalmed with occasional bursts of noise (somewhere, the instruments on the song ‘Rhoda’ are still writhing on a dirty basement floor, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder). His other musical trysts include The For Carnation, Tortoise, Royal Trux, Stereolab, currently the Yeah Yeah Yeahs – the list goes on. With typical Kraftwerkian aplomb, Florian Schneider once said: "Collaborations are the black holes of knowledge regimes"; if so, Pajo jumped right into one.
All the while his solo work, through his various Papa/Aerial/M and later Pajo guises have produced songs that are bewitching, euphonic, sometimes unsettling, and all as wide as a Kansas sky, but as this list shows, in recent times he’s been shacked up with one of his first loves.
"Metal is like an unstoppable disease," he enthuses – for proof, take in his own Evila project, with its none-more-Norwegian artwork, and his recent fascination with tweeting photographs of crypts.
Here are his favourite 13 albums. Act under advisement: contains primetime Ozzy….
Slint play Albert Hall in Manchester on November 28, ATP End Of An Era Part Two at Camber Sands on November 29-December 1 and The Forum in London on December 3; head to ATP’s website for full details. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through David’s choices
