Paul A Rosales (No, 1,189)

Paul A. Rosales by care in the community rec Hometown: Los Angeles. The lineup: Paul A Rosales The background: Paul A Rosales is only in his early 20s but he sounds way older. That might be because he slathers his music in so much distortion and fuzz, echo, reverb and decay/delay – it's like listening to someone unearthed from ancient times, namely the late-60s psychedelic era. As with psych, his music has a dreamlike quality; it haunts and disturbs. It makes explicit the strange sorrow and hint of menace missed by critics when they dismiss as bland and benign that strand of current indie known as "hypnagogic" – it puts the "ill" and "chill" into chillwave. To hear it is to not be lulled into a stupor or induce feelings of somnolent bliss but to be overwhelmed by cold and a creeping sense of dread. It's like being locked in a dark, dank tomb with a Dansette playing 60s B-sides on repeat. Or imagine what a channel called MTV Psych might have broadcast in 1968. Rosales has acknowledged the influence of Schoenberg , Brian Eno and the productions of Joe Meek , while comparisons have been made with everyone from Neu! to Neon Indian ; one fanciful type even envisaged "a gothic resemblance to a baby fat Brian Wilson". If you ask us, just think Arthur Lee meets Arthur Russell . Of course, the influence of Ariel Pink in all this is incalculable. The impression Rosales gives, when you listen to the literally degraded music on his album Wonder Wheel 1 – which sounds as though it's been left to warp and rot in the LA sun – is of a degraded character, somehow cobbling together off-kilter, sub-lo-fi pop amid the mulch and debris of a squalid apartment. We say this because he reminds us so much of Pink, whom we once interviewed at his home on the West Side of LA, a mess of strewn half-eaten pizza, musical equipment, magazines, papers, cigarette butts and assorted useless bric-a-brac, the result, perhaps, of his being so prolific he doesn't have time for such mundanities as hygiene or food. You can easily picture Rosales in a similar tableau: you set the scene; your average bummer in the summer . And yet, while Pink comes from a fairly wealthy background, with the assumption that his boho existence is a matter of choice, Rosales is from the other side of the tracks, a working-class boy currently putting himself through college. And he's no fool, savant or otherwise. A self-taught type who wrote and played every note on his album, he has, according to his press, "a great technical knowledge of musical theory and a thorough understanding of modern classical idioms". Make that thorough understanding of music per se. Because as with those other Pink acolytes John Maus , Gary War and James Ferraro, what comes across on Wonder Wheel 1 is a musician eminently capable of contriving infectious, often beautiful songs who, for whatever reasons, insists on "ruining" them with din. This isn't noise-pop a la the Jesus and Mary Chain , though, where the song remains conventionally pretty under all the noise; here, the very structure of the tune is forced to accommodate all manner of blips and seizures, cracks and fissures, not to mention all the mumbles and cryptic shouting over the deliberately roughly edited hubbub. There's a lovely track on the album called Clarity Dissolve, which is as good a description of this sound as any. But what is the point? There must be a point – surely it's just as easy these days to achieve a clean "hi-fi" sound on a laptop in a bedroom as it is this kind of muffled murk. Is Rosales, like they used to say about Frank Zappa, an adept tunesmith who can't resist sabotaging all attempts at poppiness? After all, if you remove the sonic goo from Erroneous Soul Song you're left with a catchy pop number. The question of his intentions really starts to nag on Eyes, the single he's recorded with R Stevie Moore , the godfather, according to Pink and Rosales, of all this prodigiously creative lo-fi home-recording lark. In this case, he's produced a bona fide potential hit single, only the production itself makes that outcome utterly unlikely. So why do it? Beats us. Still, while we're pondering his motives and methods, you can enjoy his music, which really is weirdly sunny and gorgeously/grotesquely groovy. The buzz: "The highest-grade low fidelity shit" – 20 JazzFunkGreats . The truth: Rosales puts the "hip" into "hypnagogic". Most likely to: Bring out the Brightlitblueskies . Least likely to: Achieve clarity. What to buy: Wonder Wheel 1 is available on Care in the Community, and it can be streamed on Spotify and last.fm . The single collaboration with R Stevie Moore, Eyes/Pulled Over, is out now on 7in and download. File next to: Ariel Pink, Arthur Lee, R Stevie Moore, Joe Meek. Links: myspace.com/paul_a_rosales . Friday's new band: Pepper.