Arrington de Dionyso follows a fractured muse, churning out grooves that
are both razor-sharp and random, howling, whispering and wearing his
larynx raw with Tuvan throat-singing. His seventh full-length album, named
for the year that the Mayan Long Count Calendar says will be the earth's
last, is an apocalyptic romp through no wave and blues, sitar drone and
free-jazz improvisation. It's anchored, as all OTR records have been, by
the shuddering funk of Aaron Hartman's bass, bottom-feeding our basest
desires to move while de Dionyso urges us toward psychotropic
visions. Jamie Petersen is the fourth drummer, filling the big shoes of
Phil Elvrum and Bryce Panic with a crazy locked-in intensity. This rhythm
section percolates with the inevitability of great funk drum and bass,
punctuating its steady, off-kilter progress with rifle-shot explosions and
dead stops. It's a scaffolding that de Dionyso swings from wildly, ranting
out his mind-shaking tales of monkey men in chemical factories, spectacular
traffic jams, reptilian monsters and, quite literally, wolves at the door.
2012 starts with the funk-flavored, falsetto-embellished "Chemical
Factory," sounding for all the world like Prince after, or perhaps during,
electro-shock treatment. It's a love story, of sorts, all anxious,
pent-up sexual energy erupting in lines like, "Hey princess/ Let down your
hair/ Cos I want to take you/ To the chemical factory." Yet it's also about
the alienation of the title's naked ape, 10,000 years later walking upright
like a man, but enraged and confused by the technology that surrounds
him. Displacement, aggression and panic erupt through the lyrics and via the
jagged chimes, rough-sawed guitars and saxophone squeals, a detuned anarchy
of pagan sounds. It is followed by the more real-world images of "Los
Angeles," where a bare-bones dialog between bass and drums simmers under
ratcheting guitars and blaring sax. The cut moves at a moderate pace, but
with such intense, suppressed energy that it feels much faster than it
is. You can hardly help but move to its beat, which jerks and stops and
starts again with mad metronomic precision.
Up to this point, 2012 is very much like last year's Lost
Light, combining abstract visions with propulsive, stuttering
beats. Yet with "Wolves and Wolverines," de Dionyso begins to push the
envelope still further, opening the cut with spitting, breathing, hissing
mouth sounds that form a rhythmic counterpart, and dissolving the cut into
free-jazz squall near its end. De Dionyso, who has studied throat singing
with a Mongolian master, moves even further out the curve with "Magnetic
Electric," a pulsing, vibrating two minutes of weird, backward voice sounds
and ominous thudding drums. The track is wordless and shapeless, yet
curiously compelling as it ebbs and flows with surges of electric
overtones. "Tundra," later on the album, explores the throat-singing art
again, in a shuddering, clicking, tone-shifting landscape of weird
organicness.
De Dionyso is also fascinated with Indian sounds, an interest that shows up
most clearly in the twanging sitar notes of "Her Fire Chills Me,"
juxtaposed here against surges of accordion and a ramshackle, repetitive
beat. His passion for free jazz — and jazz/world music interstices like
the work of Kadri Gopalnath — can be heard in the abstracted saxophone
flourishes that
accompany even his most accessible grooves. "The Blood and the Milk,"
which closes out 2012, is particularly effective in the way it
merges meditative saxophone with gorgeous slow-moving organ tones, in a
secular hymn to an ending world.
This is wonderful work, taking the schizoid, Pere Ubu-ish frenzy of Lost
Light and layering on the sounds of multiple cultures and
traditions. Robert Frost once pondered whether the world would end in fire
or ice. De Dionyso posits a different finale, where euphoric,
elbow-throwing dancers stomp out frenzied dances to the thump of bass and
drums.
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