“It’s one of those things you kind of daydream about in the shower, what would I do?” Aaron Hemphill says of the prospect of making a Baker’s Dozen list. “When the time comes, it’s just panic.”
The shower anxiety arrives as the Berlin-based Hemphill releases his second album as Nonpareils, Rhetoric & Terror, via Mute Records. It’s an album that journeys between dissonance and woozy psychedelia, sometimes – such as on the fantastic first song ‘Opening Chord’, within the space of a few seconds. Pop melodies and punishing rhythms have long been Hemphill’s forte, stretching right back through Nonpareils to his years alongside Angus Andrew at the core of Liars, arguably the greatest group the US underground produced during the early 00s. There are call-backs to Liars here, in the way that the vocal harmonies of a track like ‘Unscripting The Snake’ slither just the right side of uncomfortable alongside what might otherwise bucolic woodwind and gentle percussion, like taking a walk up some Californian canyon, tripping on acid, but seeing the smoke of a wildfire starting to drift of the path you’ve just walked – the path home.
Back to the Baker’s Dozen. There were abandoned concepts for compiling it, including choosing music that would give a different musical picture of his birthplace of Los Angeles to what we might typically assume to be “L.A. music”. In the end, Hemphill settled on a list of records that’d give anyone who was entirely unaware of him, or the Nonpareils project, a sense of who he was. “These are these are albums by artists that made an imprint on me, whether I want them in the room when I make a record or not,” he says, “Before I start making a record, I listen to new and different stuff, but during the process, I listen to comfort food.”
Like many artists, Hemphill has music to fulfil these dietary needs. “One of my favourite records is The Slider by T-Rex and it has nothing to do with my music, and that’s part of the joy in listening to it,” he says, “I just have fun. It’s one of the few records I just listen to and I love it.” Most of all, though, Hemphill says that “throughout making records with Liars or this album, these are things I can’t shake from my head.”
Nonpareils’ new album Rhetoric & Terror is out now via Mute. To begin reading Aaron Hemphill’s Baker’s Dozen, click ‘first record’ below.
