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Arrington
de Dionyso, Mark France & Gioela Pagliaccia
Bijou
Cafe
132 SW 3rd Ave., 222-3187
9 pm Friday,
June 23
Donations welcome
The
Dionyso/F&G show is part of the Improvised Music
Series,
one of Portland's experimental music strongholds.
Old
Time Relijun's latest release, a five-song EP called La
Sirena de Pacera, is available from Olympia's K Records.
Old
Time Relijun pops up in the damnedest places. The Hermetic
Fellowship, a crew of Portlanders serious about building
a mystery, name-checks the band on its Web site:
www.teleport.
com/~aforrest/
HFWeb/
HFindex.html.
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The Northwest music world offers few spectacles as unsettling
as Old Time Relijun. The Olympia band's primitive
pounding blazes loud and clear in a scene that's often too
precious to be believed. Singer/guitarist Arrington di
Dionyso seems seized by dark Knowledge, and his caterwauling
ricochets through your unconscious for days after a show.
This week, di Dionyso visits Portland for a solo experimental
performance, sure to be an absorbingly weird display. I
spoke with Olywa's prophet of doom via telephone.
Willamette Week: So, what's up with the solo
show?
Arrington de Dionyso: I'll be presenting a new improvisational
piece titled Abraxasaxophonic Smooth Jazz Vagina.
The piece is my attempt to alchemically fuse the two
most disparate present-day strains of what used to be jazz:
completely free-form, abrasive avant-garde jazz, and smooth
jazz, which is marketed as something to help your work day
go easier. These two things both grew from the same seed,
from New Orleans, from brothels and taverns. I'll be playing,
and while I'm doing free jazz, I'll have a radio on playing
whatever smooth jazz station I can find. In the Kabbala,
they talk about extracting the spark of light from the mass
of dark matter, and I'm trying to extract whatever spark
of light remains buried in smooth jazz.
Devious. How'd you think of all this?
When Old Time Relijun was on tour, we kept tuning into smooth-jazz
stations. There's a smooth-jazz station in every city and
country hamlet. We discovered that if you turn up your car
stereo, you start getting all this distortion, and suddenly
smooth jazz sounds really different. And I thought it'd
be interesting if I played along with that.
What will you play?
I'll have a bass clarinet, an alto sax and a contralto
clarinet.
Did you hijack your high school band's bus?
I just pick up whatever I can, whenever I can. The bass
clarinet I practically stole from a pawn shop in Oklahoma
City. I mean, I'm sure it was stolen. I got it for $200,
and then I took it to someone to look at, and he said, 'My
God, it's worth a hell of a lot more than that.'
What does this solo effort mean for Old Time Relijun?
We just toured Europe, which was quite amazing. I still
feel like we're a completely unknown band in the U.S., but
our first show in Rome was completely sold out. People in
the front row sang along with songs from the first album,
which is out of print.
It's interesting that Europeans would take to your music,
because I think of Old Time Relijun's sort of Pentecostal
energy as typically American.
It's almost a cliché to have a band that's pushing
the envelope over here be embraced over there. I mean, that's
been going on since Josephine Baker in the '20s. We've sold
more of the new album over there than we have over here--which
still isn't a whole lot, of course. But we got great responses
in Italy and France, and played in Slovenia, Croatia and
the Czech Republic on the sort of Eastern Bloc part of the
tour. Slovenia, which was just one show, was incredible.
That show wasn't in a city, it was in more like an abandoned
town. We asked a girl what the industry around there was,
and she said, 'Well, there was a chemical plant, but it
closed down 15 years ago.' And it was overrun by giant frogs.
Frogs?
Yeah, it was the middle of the mating season for this
species of giant frog they only have in Slovenia. We drove
into town and saw this warning sign, basically saying "FROG
CROSSING." And then we saw the corpses of thousands, I mean
thousands, of giant frogs. It was like the second or third
plague in Exodus, or whatever.
That must have delighted you.
Yes.
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