In another era, not too far gone, this would have been an almost unthinkable outcome. As an undergra

On a Monday morning in July, Ariel Pink was idly wandering through his house in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, theater tickets broadway ticket brokers speaking by phone and giving a virtual tour. In the room where he sleeps, he said, an eight-track recorder theater tickets broadway ticket brokers was stationed on a shelf; in the living room he described a haphazard stack of instruments, guitars on top of keyboards on top of amplifiers.
None of the instruments did. After years of recording at home, he now works miles away, in a converted studio downtown. The eight-track in the bedroom was in disarray, an unplugged monument to a past life. "This is a junk shop, to be totally honest," he said.
On Tuesday, he and his band, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, will release "Mature Themes" (4AD), the latest willfully odd installment in a discography that has, over the last decade, come to serve as a kind of a thought experiment: What happens to a bedroom artist when the entire online universe is his bedroom? What becomes of the margins when they are, increasingly, just one click away from the center?
There was a time when Ariel Pink, 34, would have been a cult artist, an outsider known mostly by samizdat and word of mouth. He began recording in his father's garage theater tickets broadway ticket brokers when he was a child. He sang songs of his own devising to his mother. And he knew just enough about music history to know, in the late '90s, when he started documenting his noisy, fractured compositions in earnest, that no one would ever hear them.
The lone savant making music for a tiny but fiercely theater tickets broadway ticket brokers loyal audience is an enduringly romantic rock archetype. Think of Jandek, the shadowy Houston artist who has released more than 60 LPs of discordant folk, available by mail order via an anonymous post office box.
Ariel Pink has collaborated with R. Stevie Moore, another quixotic soul whose hundreds of ambitiously overstuffed low-fidelity albums — released since the late '60s in flurries of reel-to-reel theater tickets broadway ticket brokers tapes, cassettes and CD-Rs — overwhelm even Mr. Moore's ability to count them. And on "Mature Themes," Ariel Pink and the Los Angeles vocalist DâM-FunK cover "Baby," the gently soulful 1979 single from Joe and Donnie Emerson, two teenage brothers who recorded a lost, recently reissued album of winsome pop in a home-built studio in the distant town of Fruitland, Wash.
This is Ariel Pink's lineage. But unlike the majority of his predecessors, he's found a sizable audience: theater tickets broadway ticket brokers the result of good luck — an early demo he passed to the band Animal Collective led to a contract with the group's label, theater tickets broadway ticket brokers Paw Tracks — and better timing. His first Paw Tracks release, "The Doldrums," came out in 2004, right as the old cognoscenti were reorganizing themselves into new and more robustly connected communities online. Ariel Pink spent the rest of that decade releasing his old bedroom tapes, repackaged as new releases.
In 2010, Pitchfork gave his Haunted Graffiti's first album of freshly recorded material, theater tickets broadway ticket brokers "Before Today" (4AD), its coveted Best New Music designation. The site went on to name the band's sleepily nostalgic "Round and Round" the No. 1 song of that year.
In another era, not too far gone, this would have been an almost unthinkable outcome. As an undergraduate at first the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then the California Institute of the Arts, Ariel Pink lugged plastic shopping bags full of cassette tapes of his music from apartment to apartment. "I just stared at them for hours and hours, trying to invoke some sort of juju in them," willing the unloved recordings "into some sort of posterity," he remembered.
A decade later, he has sold tens of thousands of records. He's toured the world. He has even, as he made a point of noting, made friends along the way. "I've been a social person for a long time now," he said.
Ariel Pink's journey out of the shadows and into the light is perhaps a familiar story, but it also signals a rare sea change, a permanent shift in the way music functions at the margins. "Mature Themes" is in many ways a deeply silly record. Ariel Pink has a dreamy, old-fashioned way with melody. But he's also prone to jarring interjections, switching without ceremony from a smooth Donny Osmond croon to campy impersonations of daffy robots and soap-opera theater tickets broadway ticket brokers vampires. His music, rooted in the sweet, sunny pop of AM radio, invites you in and pushes you away in equal measure. "My name is Ariel," he croons on one song. "And I'm a nympho."