Brave New World

[December 10th, 2008]

The voice that came out of my cell phone—the one attached to the larynx and lungs of Arrington de Dionyso—was not what I was expecting.

On record, de Dionyso is the tortured blues bark and Captain Beefheart asphalt gargle behind Old Time Relijun or the intoxicating, throaty drone that haunts his latest solo effort, I See Beyond the Black Sun. I had braced myself for a raw combination of all three that would make my eardrums shudder—but was greeted instead with a soothing tenor, calmly spelling out the methods behind his compositional madness.

“It would scare my mother,” he said, speaking from his North Portland home. “She thought I was doing some kind of demonic incantation.” The 33-year-old learned of his ability to throat sing when he was 5, making spontaneous growls and hums around the house to startling effect. It would be another 12 years, when he heard a selection from the Smithsonian Folkways collection Tuva: Voices From the Center of Asia on the radio, before de Dionyso could put these sounds into context. “I realized instantly that this 3,000- to 4,000-year-old shamanic Siberian culture had a precise correspondence with that part of my own voice that I played around with as a small kid,” he says with a twinge of bewilderment. “That set me on a quest to learn about music like that and music from all over the world.”

It’s a hunt that has had a marked influence on his musical efforts over the years. Old Time Relijun songs often find him mixing elements of Asian, Middle Eastern and African modalities in with the band’s signature dirty blues stomp. He is also a well-regarded improvisational artist that has released a number of collaborative discs with like-minded musicians such as free jazz pianist Thollem McDonas and percussionist Garth Powell.

Both Black Sun and his previous one-man effort, Breath of Fire, combine these strains of de Dionyso’s musical background into a heady musical brew. The albums carry flutters of the non-Western models de Dionyso has explored stitched through with pure experimentation.

But the music on Black Sun isn’t an attempt to approximate sounds of other cultures. The songs are a purer breed of experimentation that finds de Dionyso stretching out notes and tones to improbable lengths while filtering his voice through a variety of instruments, including a bass clarinet and a snare drum.

It makes for hypnotic and strangely soothing listening, particularly in the case of “Les Grenouilles de Cherbourg,” an extended piece that finds the drones and honks of de Dionyso’s bass clarinet accompanied by a chorus of frogs. The piece (available only on the CD version of the release) was one of a handful of field recordings cooked up by collaborator Frank Lawrence—a series that including performances at a shipyard, a city dump and a marsh filled with the titular amphibians. “We had a real wild couple of hours,” de Dionyso remembers. “I really hoped to establish some kind of communication with those animals. I don’t know if the frogs particularly appreciated that I was there, though.”

The longer pieces on Black Sun, particularly the 16-minute opener “AION (Intuition and Science),” have a spiritual edge. They are reminiscent of Indian ragas or the drones used to aid in Tantric meditation—hypnotically repeating the same notes and tones, while slowly adding layers and subtle variations.

“There’s an austerity to the way each note is introduced,” he says, “I’ll stay on a single note and explore every shade of possibility of how to present that note and then move on.” This theme is echoed in his artwork for the album, which features drawings of the naked female form repeated again and again with changes in color and facial expression.

When de Dionyso speaks of the creative process, it’s in rather shamanistic terms. “I very much go on this idea that music is something that you receive from a larger source,” he says. “I’m just the messenger. I’m just the channel that you tune to on the radio.”