Seven minutes in heaven

Arrington De Dionyso’s horn-rimmed glasses and pronounced mustache don’t illuminate much about his creative character. Neither do his snowflake patterned, 1970s ski sweater or the comfortable piece of attic crawlspace he’s invited me into for an interview.

Rather, to attempt a description of where his career as a musician stands today is to first look past De Dionyso’s eccentric character and absorb his voluminous artistic output, a multipronged collection of material that seeks to fulfill a vision as varied as his wardrobe.

One could see him perform clad in golden short-shorts (and only golden short-shorts) as the prophetic sweaty frontman of Olympia’s Old Time Relijun, and still claim witness to only part of his multidimensional artistic persona.

Most of the difficulty lies in keeping up with his various projects. I was able to catch The Naked Future in early January, a noise/improvisational free jazz quartet for which Arrington plays bass clarinet.

It might seem like a regrettable progression for the near-nude, maniacal woodsman of Old Time Relijun to don a blazer and woodwind for a night of noodling, but The Naked Future has a powerful and somehow focused aesthetic that is far more experiential than intellectual.

“Using very traditional jazz instruments (bass clarinet, drums, double-bass and saxophone),” De Dionyso says, “[The Naked Future] are informed just as much by what we know about electronic sound, postmodern music and film scores … and yet we choose to play our music without any kind of electric modification.”

That postmodern approach to free improvisation—a forceful, muscular meditation on madness amongst repetition—created a relentless explosion of noise and nuance that night at Valentine’s. It’s perhaps the most exciting aspect of his music, one that might have begun with the danceability of Old Time Relijun and continues most profoundly with his first solo album, I See Beyond the Black Sun (out now on K Records), which he will take to Europe this winter for a six-week tour.

Using the bass clarinet, homemade instruments and remarkable tuvan throat singing, Black Sun has his wildly aggressive tones and rhythms elevated to hypnotic, haunting and spiritual levels. It’s an incredibly engrossing early-21st-century take on ancient Indian and shaman traditions, alternately satisfying and oddly accessible to anyone with an ear for subtlety or the need for a quick transcendental experience between classes.

The album begins the spiritual journey with deep resonant tones from his throat and clarinet, surrounded by trance-like drones from what may be mouth harps or swamps full of frogs. The effect is an extended but much needed realignment of the ear and mind.

Each track builds the over-arching experience, which in the 12-minute titular song has De Dionyso’s vision broken wide open with a guest appearance by Old Time Relijun’s Germain Baca. Her simple, suggestive drumbeat reveals it all—the irresistible sexuality, the tribal durability of sound and the ominous repetition of our modern mechanical world.

No sooner had Arrington begun explaining the meaning or anti-meaning of the words “The Naked Future” (“It’s like looking into this black empty hole that is like the rest of the universe”), than the man with an impossibly full plate began telling me about a fourth project he plans to start.

“I don’t know what it will be called, I don’t know who would be in it and I don’t know what it would actually sound like,” De Dionyso says. “It’s all stuff I’m composing in my head right now, I might not be able to work on it until April.” With not a little ambiguity aside, I certainly look forward to hearing it.