Search - Aranos :: Transfixiatio

Sonomu & I

Hoichi, the Earless | Sietch Tabr, Arrakis | 04/15/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"from sonomu.net:



"The weepy, wiry fiddling heard on Nurse With Wound's 'Acts of Senseless Beauty', skittering Old World refrains wrenched into distorted and dreamlike forms to complement Stephen Stapleton's Dadaist sonic splatterings, heralded the arrival of Aranos. With this contribution to Noise Museum's "New Music" series, the violinist bridges the undefinable musical spaces shared by eccentrics from worlds and decades apart, Anthony Manning and Anima. Aranos employs textural techniques common to both - the Fuchs' manipulation of sonorous resonances >from bowed glass, metal and stone and synthesizer phrasings which, like Manning's, sidle melody by inching up and down invented tonal scales. He then handfasts the reluctant marriage of organic resonations and electronic envelopes with the barbed and piercing spun-gold lashings of his violin. On "Light," Aranos' deliberately slow bowing and amplified echoes of a predominantly dark prism of timbres act as a psychic battery, accumulating the charged energies of fitful sleep and fueling unsettled dreams which dance with charcoal sketches of anatomical perversions worthy of Czech animators. The ominous bellow and capering portamenti of "Enter" and the twenty-three minute "Transfixiatio" toe the brink of Infernal bacchanalia; but "Skip" and "Neverflame," a manic minuet for mincing fire-demons and airborne angels, imbue Aranos' mutant chamber stylings with a delirious stripe of improvisational danger, daring to leap off that edge and into undiscovered neoclassical hinterlands. Or into the deleterious dementia of H.P. Lovecraft's fateful fiddler, Erich Zann."





In addition all I can add is that i've never in my life heard a violin create the kind of ghostly presence that just literally skips right off this record and dances around in the shadows of whatever room its playing in...this is the kind of invocation that the erhu does for rivers & moonlight, though here for whispered thoughts of forlorn phantoms, the hollowed outlines of figures cast in motlen solitude, the creeping, breathless wonder of a deserted room endlessly mocked by time....



Nothing i've ever heard sounds like this, not even William Basinski who creates on a likewise plane....the one thing i've ever heard as amazing as this record was a song Carla Kihlstedt did for on a Tom Waits called, "Fawn"...



Simply beyond music.."