Magnetic Fields' Realism Explained

Few figures in contemporary pop music have created as varied and distinct a body of work as Stephin Merritt.

He made beautiful synth-pop songs with The Magnetic Fields when synths were about as cool as neon T-shirts. Then he abandoned the instrument just when it was on the cusp of a popular comeback, dropping an the eclectic triple album, 69 Love Songs, in the process.

CHARTattack caught up with Merritt over the phone from New York a week prior to the release of the latest Magnetic Fields album, Realism. He continued to bristle against mainstream tastes and expectations.

CHARTattack: You've called your new album, Realism, a sister album to Distortion. How so?
Stephin Merritt: I initially was going to put them out at the same time, but Distortion took too long to mix, so it was unrealistic to put them out at the same time. But two years apart is close to the same time.

Was Realism recorded at the same time as Distortion, then?
No. But I thought about it at the same time.

Do they share any of the same themes lyrically?
No. It's more on the production style. Nothing about lyrics.

What do you mean by production style? Sonically, they're quite different.
Yes. I can confidently say they are not often mistaken for each other. I mean, the production styles are in opposition to one another.

You've said that The Jesus And Mary Chain, specifically their album Psychocandy, was a bit influence on Distortion. What records influenced Realism?
I think it was the two mid-'60s Judy Collins albums, In My Life and Wildflowers, which when I was little, I thought were typical folk records. And what a wonderful world it would be if those two albums were typical of anything. But no, they're a typical influence in that they are typically my templates for making records.

They were a big jumping off point for 69 Love Songs. Those two albums are as eclectic as one can get without losing the genre label of folk. You can't attach that label to her earlier work, but based on these records you would have thought of her as a folk singer.

When did you first hear those records?
Probably soon after they came out when I was little.

And what drew you to them as a child?
I think the fact that they sounded different every three minutes would be a big plus as a four-year-old.

Are you interested in folk music in a broader sense?
I think the whole category of folk music is a marketing construction based on racism and regionalism. In the first half of the 20th century, Billboard magazine's charts were only three: pop, race and folk.

Race was anything done by African-Americans, and folk was what corresponds roughly to country and western now — itself a racist tag, but also all traditional music that was not made by African-Americans.

If something came in from leftfield, like Harry Belafonte, it might get in the pop charts because it had so little to do with the rest of the music in the race charts. It would be hard to imagine The Carter Family doing something leftfield enough to ever get them out of the folk charts no matter what they did because they had the accents. So they put them in the folk charts.

Along with being companion albums, Distortion and Realism are also part of your "No Synth Trilogy" with i. What made you want to step away from the synth sound of your older records?
I think the technology in synthesizers had stopped changing, and there was nothing new to work with. As a synthesizer player, I was always expecting a new sound, to be able to make a new sound. So now that some time has passed — 10 years, in fact — there are new synthesizers, and I'm buying them and really enjoying them. They don't sound like the old ones.

How has synthesizer technology changed over the last 10 years?
They're being designed by artists and not by manufacturers. Reed Ghazala's book Circuit Bending has had an excellent influence on hobbyists. He's showing people how to tinker together something that has a manufactured basis but is itself handmade.