SC Distributon

You may have experienced Arrington de Dionyso?s Malaikat dan Singa as an unexpected live force, pushing up through the earth like daffodils in late winter; or maybe you?re familiar with their previous exploits in the studio, Malaikat dan Singa [KLP215] and Suara Naga [KLP226], which burn clean with fragrant traumas. Open the Crown is similarly passion-filled, with new vistas (channeled hallucinations) exploring English (previously only the Indonesian language was employed) as their stomping ground to expand parallel themes anew. Open the Crown conveys tendrils of raw energy emanating from the head ? dream visions translated directly to audio outrage. Heavy. And sexy. To be expected from Arrington de Dionyso and his molten collection of Malaikat dan Singa who manipulate the ?form?d and the formless? to create from within this broken system.

You know how in the 1950s the press and parents and such talked about how rock'n'roll had some evil, sexual, tribal force that was going to possess the youth? Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat dan Singa is really that. Trance-punk dancehall explosion gonna knock you up! 2011! Formerly of Old Time Relijun, this is Dionyso's second Malaikat Dan Singa release, the lyrics for which are entirely in (self-taught) Indonesian. Fancy!

Some artists push the envelope, Arrington de Dionyso eats the envelope and spits out an origami of sound.Malaikat Dan Singa is a collection of throbbing, hallucinogenic, trance-inducing trans-utopian cosmic post-punk sounds from Old Time Relijun's Arrington de Dionyso. Never one to compromise in pursuit of his twisted visions of the future of music, de Dionyso not only rattles listeners with heavy grooves but he also sings every song on this album in Indonesian, with some of the lyrics being lifted from the poems of William Blake and passages from The Zohar. Malaikat Dan Singa is an album of translated and personal mysticism that sounds like it was dug up from the Earth. Although there is a familiar (drums, bass, guitar) and foreign (bass clarinet, throat-singing, echoplex) rhythm -- with a mixture of post-punk and Gamelan tendencies, Malaikat Dan Singa is really Future World Music. And you can dance to it.

I See Beyond the Black Sun pushes de Dionyso's previous solo album Breath of Fire (2006) from a charcoal sketchbook into a Technicolor landscape with more clarity, shape and definition. The album is structured with two immense bookends "AION" and "Pluto in Capricorn (I See Beyond the Black Sun)." "AION" creates a rhythmic drone that specifies the rules for movements of the melodies on the album in a convergent up and down scale ? continuing to climb the color spectrum ever so slowly. The gradient shift is deceptively hidden before exploding into color on the parenthetical title track. "Pluto in Capricorn (I See Beyond the Black Sun)" ? featuring a guest appearance by Old Time Relijun drummer Germaine Baca ? is the culminating catharticconclusion, a propulsive mythical beast that combines all the previous pieces into a new separate entity where sparks begin to rise. It is the crossing over and the release.

While Arrington's work with Old Time Relijun has brought much in the way of both critical praise and notoriety for ecstatic-rock deconstructions and a frenzied performance on the edge of possession, "Breath of Fire" is a very different sort of beast. Recorded on Christmas Day in a nameless town in Southern Italy, the album uses voice, bass clarinet, and jaw harps to invoke the spirits in a mind-bending ritual of technical mastery and emotional freedom. Like field recordings from a lost continent, these short pieces conspire to present a completely mysterious sound universe, unlike anything you may have heard before. To be sure this voyage is not without its reference points- fans of Old Time Relijun's live performances have longtime been aware of Arrington's multiphonic vocal research, unearthing the missing links between Tuvan throat-singing and free improvisation. In "Breath of Fire", this research is presented in its purest form- spontaneously, without overdubs or processing of any kind; an ethnography of intergalactic avant-primitive folk music, a dream diary without words, that enwraps in resonant sound.

Ever since Arrington de Dionyso cleared his throat and growled "I ate a hole right through the mirror/ Spat out the shards, and I put it back together" on the standout track "Mirror", his music has spoken to those lonely souls who have stared at themselves in the mirror and known that something lies on the other side, beyond their comprehension. The band Old Time Relijun formed in Olympia, Wash., in 1995 with bassist Aaron Hartman and drummer Bryce Panic, to take Arrington's four-track tapes that had been circulating and spooking people around Olympia, and to translate them into live performance. Since that time, the band has gone through various mutations, including a number of drummers (Phil Elvrum, currently of the Microphones, toured and recorded with Old time Relijun for several years after the departure of Bryce Panic), but the spirit of Arrington's musical explorations and creative expression have remained constant. Unlike most releases that attempt to summarize a band and an era, Varieties of Religious Experience is not a clear-the-vaults effort, and the multiple takes are not filler; nor is their inclusion the result of an unchecked ego, intoxicated by its own brilliance, unable to edit itself. It would be equally wrong to suggest that Arrington's four-track takes are "originals", the band's versions are "alternates", and one is necessarily better than the other. While four-track enabled Arrington to cram songs full of esoteric sounds and a sheer ear-popping lunacy that can turn two minutes into kaleidoscopic trips, Hartman and Panic helped loosen his grip on the drum sticks, change up the whack-a-mole tempos, and let a song's backbone slide. Calling the result Varieties of Religious Experience emphasizes Arrington's belief that it's all good - every song is its own spark of playful, in-the-moment creation, its own shard of experience - and the remarkable thing is that all is good on this CD.

In December of 2001 Arrington de Dionyso and Aaron Hartman of (Olympia/K Record's Old Time Relijun) found themselves stranded in Milan during one of the worst snowstorms in Italian history. They were sheltered, fed, and protected by the auspices of two of the most notable figures in the Italian independent/experimental music scene- Fabio Magistrali and Jacopo Andreini. This album is the result of 18 days of practicing, performing, recording and mixing with a quartet that had never played together before, but found an instant chemistry in their mutual fervor and ferocity for the exploration of new musical territories. Some moments on this album will seem familiar to the rabid fans of Old Time Relijun in their off-kilter gumbofication of free-jazz intensity with "rock played wrong", while other pieces bring the quartet through even less easily definable non-clichés of free improvisation and new music experimentalism. There are no "songs", and none of the pieces on this record have titles. Little discussion took place before the recording of each spontaneous composition, yet the results are as cohesive and whole as any master expressionist canvas.