Aerial M’s David Pajo is a softly spoken man, reticent to the point that, live, he prefers to play behind a speaker stack rather than in full view of the audience.

Seeing Aerial M, this makes perfect sense: the music speaks for itself, needs no great front or show, and instead slowly unfolds itself with a remarkable clarity of sound and an almost story-like movement. Although all his tracks are instrumental, they all start their life with lyrics. “If I can figure out some kind of narrative with words or whatever, sometimes that helps me arrange the song, figure out what kind of direction it’s supposed to go in.” But is this direction ultimately fixed, or does live performance alter things?

“I’m kind of a fascist about structure. I really like structure. I try to keep sections open where anything can happen, there’s got to be a couple of points where it breaks down, but that’s at specific points in the set where that happens. That’s just my style, I don’t really rock out too much. Playing rock venues every night, we’ve gotten a little bit louder, with some distorted drum parts and stuff. I’ve never felt like you’ve got to be faithful to the recording, that’s just sort of a skeleton that we base it on. Live we can do whatever we want, as long as it’s vaguely similar...”. Pajo’s approach to structure sometimes recalls seminal 70s New York band Television. “Yeah, probably more so in the last three or four years. I’m not sure how they influenced me musically, but I went through a period where I listened to ‘Marquee Moon’ a lot.”

Despite his modest demeanour, David Pajo has a pretty enviable position in the field of 90s guitar music. Having played with Slint, Tortoise, and Palace, he tours with Mogwai, a band who claim his music as a major influence, and he will return to the States to work with Royal Trux. Plenty to brag about, but that’s just not his style. “They [Royal Trux] just asked me to play with them. I think they’re really great people and I could learn a lot from them. They have a really... unique take on music. I’ve been lucky to play with people I really respect a lot as musicians and it’s a real education every time.”

Although there probably is an identifiable sensibility to all Pajo’s recordings, like many Chicago-based artists he is most characterised by his changing character. The question that arises when a musician goes from project to project is whether they see their work as a progression, or whether each project is a parallel one.

“I think there’s a progression, because I usually try to do something that I haven’t done before. It’s not necessarily groundbreaking, but it’s still something I’ve never done. Like when I played with Palace, I’ve never played in a band like that in my life.”

So how can you tell where one project ends and another begins?

“It’s kind of the people involved, it’s all intuitive, you start it and it builds from there, then you decide if it should be a different project, or if the name should change, or something. Because I do see it as something that’s evolving, in every sense. Even the name isn’t a set thing, which is what I liked about Palace, he kept changing the name. Which probably annoyed some people.”

This brings us to the subject of audience. What responsibility does an artist have towards their audience, how should they approach them? We tried to ask David Pajo how he saw his music being received, how he looked at his audience, but unfortunately, he misunderstood the question.

“I don’t really look at the audience. I have really bad stage fright, so I never look at the audience.”

Oh well. Here’s looking at you, David.

David Paco was talking to Malcolm, in March 1998.