Arrington de Dionyso
An uncompromising voice in contemporary music, Arrington de Dionyso integrates ancient soundmaking techniques with transmodernist inquiries into the nature of consciousness. His propulsive improvisations utilize voice and reeds (primarily bass clarinets and his invention the Bromiophone) as multiphonic tools in the navigation of liminal spaces between shamanic seance and rock and roll ecstasy.
While deeply rooted in the punk inclination to tear down musical standards in an effort for liberation, Arrington’s music weds nowave iconoclasm with the spiritual searching of Albert Ayler-era free jazz to reach towards an unveiling of primordially potent universalities. His compositions embrace sounds as colors, placing emphasis on the complimentary spectrums- from circular overtones whispered through bamboo flutes to the penetrating and deeply guttural howls of amplified throatsinging- all with the lungs of an athlete.
Whether as a band leader of a solo performer Arrington’s music evokes an “Ancient Future”, sometimes shocking and hallucinatory, always aiming to channel Spirit.
Born in Chicago in 1975, this son of Methodist ministers later attended theater school in Arkansas and taught himself seven languages. After moving to the Pacific Northwest, as a youth Arrington supported himself as a traveling busker selling cassette tapes until he arrived in Olympia to study ethnomusicology at the Evergreen State College. In 1995 he founded the underground rock band Old Time Relijun which garnered critical praise and a loyal fanbase over the course of endless tours of the US and Europe, releasing dozens of albums on K Records. In 2009 he created Malaikat dan Singa (“Angels and Lions”), a powerful new project integrating dancehall rhythms with gamelan scales, using the Indonesian language to interpret the mystic poetry of William Blake.
In 2011 Arrington was invited to do an artist residency in Indonesia that initiated the first of many tours of Java with the groundbreaking indigenous metal-art-noise band SENYAWA. It was during these travels that Arrington learned of the Javanese Horse Trance ritual known as “Jathilan” and began to organize collaborations with traditional village musicians throughout Indonesia, as part of a lifelong obsession with the powerful ability of certain kinds of “intense music” to alter ordinary awareness and induce spiritual experiences. Travels such as these, oscillating between the extremes of the contemporary avant-garde and ancient trance music traditions, helped Arrington develop a unique approach to using music as a bridge between diverse global cultures while interrogating and rejecting the domination of “Western” definitions of what music can even be. He has played in ceremony with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Morocco, Bauls in Bangladesh, throat-singing shamans in Tuva, and ancient instrument reconstructionists in Peru.
Recently he introduced THE VOICE MASK into his ceremony- the mask is made by putting a Spirit into a painted garbage basket decorated with aluminum foil and wax paper that buzzes and amplifies certain tones while singing.