Rare are the bands that makes their best record more than 20 years into their careers, but such is the case with Old Time Relijun, whose new full-length See Now and Know reveals a group hungrier and more adventurous than ever. To be frank, though, Arrington de Dionyso’s OTR have always maintained high quality control (see especially 2001’s Witchcraft Rebellion and 2007’s Catharsis in Crisis), purveying feral rock animated by the more aggressive tendencies of jazz, funk, and post-punk, with de Dionyso‘s guttural vocals sparring spectacularly with Aaron Hartman’s tensile stand-up bass lines and beats (now produced by Germaine Baca) that punch with the rugged grooviness of CAN, Pop Group, and Blurt. Permeating every second of OTR’s music is de Dionyso’s primal energy—a chaotic kundalini that coils through their songs like a python on amphetamines.
In advance of Old Time Relijun‘s show at Sunset Tavern Thursday, April 25, I interview de Dionyso, an accomplished visual artist whose work bizarrely entangled him in the Pizzagate conspiracy.
The Stranger: What spurred Old Time Relijun to reunite? Did the fucked-up social-political climate inspire you to get back into action?
Arrington de Dionyso: We never “broke up” as a band, but after our last album (Catharsis in Crisis) was released in 2007, we were on tour for almost a year straight, all over the US and Europe. At the end of that very rewarding but also extremely exhausting period we all ended up living in different cities. We fully intended to keep things rolling, but logistics really got complicated any time we started discussing possibilities, and after a certain point we were all pretty deeply engaged in our own other projects. I started getting really heavily involved with the experimental music scene in Indonesia, and touring with Malaikat dan Singa made the most sense for a while.
Our political climate has always been fucked up, but yeah, you know things have gotten crazier and crazier since the election, and as you know I got wrapped up in some intrigue against my will. My immediate response to the political climate was to launch a new project, This Saxophone Kills Fascists, and I did a full US tour trying to play in as many “red states” as possible—but this music was of a more “abstraction-meets-spiritual as a means of resistance” kind of thing—just total raw protest music played mainly on saxophone.
After that tour, playing everything from churches to bookstores to political information meetings, Aaron (Hartman, OTR bassist) and I started having more discussions on the power of rock music to bring people together. Over the last decade, most of my work has been about engaging other cultural tropes, translations into other languages and foreign contexts, and playing with pure abstraction. We were starting to miss that weird “sing-along” power that Old Time Relijun was always able to harness in our live shows, and it felt really important to us to put some focus on that again. And I won’t lie—as a band we’ve always had a really deep relationship with our fans, so when I saw the enthusiastic response we would get on social media when we posted pictures of our first band practice in years, it really gave me a lot of energy.
See Now and Know might be OTR’s strongest album—and if I remember correctly, your funkiest. Did you approach it differently from past releases? Did it take a while for the players to get back into the groove?
Thanks! That Old Time Relijun groove is just pure muscle memory. It was a little shocking how easy it was to channel the vibe again. Going over the old material, we can pretty much play that stuff in our sleep, or underwater in a submarine.
In recording the album, I’d say our creative approach was pretty much how we’ve always worked, but the circumstances around it were quite different. This was the first album we’ve ever done without access to the ancient analog gear at Dub Narcotic Studio in Olympia, which effectively closed operations when the building sold last year. Aaron built a simple studio in the basement of his house, and really took charge of producing the sessions. In just one or two band practices we came up with enough sketches to start building the songs.
I never do any actual “writing” until almost all of the parts are recorded. I read that David Byrne does the exact same thing—just listening to the tracks over and over again and kind of humming out words to see what works. I wrote the lyrics and recorded all the vocals in one night. The first song is mostly from the Bible. “I Know I’m Alive” was inspired by Fred Rogers—you know? “It’s such a good feeling to know you’re alive,” but when you think about fascism taking over the world, making the decision to stay alive is a statement of protest. So we have to use this music to help people stay alive and stay together.
What is your philosophy of music-making? What motivates you to create it?
Music is how I find meaning in my life. I think in this current culture, about 95 percent of all the music being made right now is to sell beer, or cars, or some fucking cell-phone thing. But it wasn’t like that through most of human history. Music is how humans first connected with the natural world—we a part of nature, and yet somehow able to reflect on the ways that consciousness made us something apart from nature. At one time, all music was “trance music” in that it was used to map different states of awareness and bring people into mythic dimensions. So I’m always working hard to figure that stuff out and find ways to translate that inherently psychedelic experience onto the unsuspecting contemporary listener. Whether it’s in disguise as a “jazz” thing or a rock-and-roll band, we leave the threads of sacred experience hanging out the seams so people can latch on and find their way through it if they’re willing.
Can you talk about how you became involved with Master Musicians of Jajouka? Please talk about your experience playing with them and how it’s affected you.
Some really extraordinary synchronicities allowed for the activation of a lifetime of creative visualization when about a year ago I met Bachir Attar and his brother Mustafa from the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Now, on the one hand, they are the inheritors of an unbroken millennia-old trance music tradition from the Rif Mountains in Northern Morocco, but through their proximity to the rough and tumble Beat characters like William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, etc. in the late 1960s, their tiny village became a kind of psychedelic mecca for seekers of extreme musical experiences. They became famous for working with the Rolling Stones, but actually they had a much richer relationship with Ornette Coleman. Even though only a little bit of their work together has ever been released publicly, working with Ornette had a massive impact on Bachir as a young musician and even today he considers him like an ascended master.
So my relationship with them came out of a series of discussions about how we could create a new kind of trance music that has never been heard before—because the roots of the music of Jajouka have always been explicitly having to do with ceremonies for healing, and here we are kind of stuck between purely ancient and contemporary modes of operation trying to find ways to bring healing music to a world full of sickness.
After a year of working on this, we were finally able to produce only three concerts on the East Coast just this past month. We had some incredible special guests join us—Jamal Moore in Baltimore, and Evan Parker even jumped on stage with us in NYC! It’s definitely my hope that those shows mark the beginning of some bigger things. They really want to be able to play in Seattle as soon as possible. Bachir has good memories of past visits.
Have there been any more repercussions from the Pizzagate fiasco, or has it died down?
It’s so funny you ask, because I just got back from a presentation I gave today at a local college about conspiracy theories, fake news, doxxing, and Pizzagate. I get random hate mail from idiots every now and again, but I think the most serious repercussions from having my art connected to the Pizzagate is how it forces me to take a step back in consideration of the wider implications of what it means to be an artist and what the effects of what I am putting out into the world might be. It requires me to be a better artist.
You know, that mural I made that was shown on all the Alex Jones websites, trying to call me a devil-worshipper and all this stupidity—it wasn’t made to convey any “meaning” whatsoever. I was just mixing colors and trying to create some cool imagery that worked with the venue. But it doesn’t work for me to say that “it’s just art,” because if I truly believe that art has any power—power to affect people, power to translate sacred mystery through color and form, power to engage and provoke and question—then I have to be more prepared to stand by my work and also to defend the work of any artist being attacked by a purely literalist, fundamentalist viewpoint that sees no nuance or subtlety in anything. So yeah, Pizzagate hasn’t killed me yet, so I guess it made me stronger? Just wait until I assume my ultimate fighting form!
What else is on the horizon for you and OTR?
I’m really glad my bandmates let me put the song in Spanish on the album. We’re getting some airplay in Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and a few other places. I was just in Peru last month working on the soundtrack to a documentary film my friend is making about Cerro de Pasco, the highest altitude city in the world, which is also one of the most polluted due to the open pit extraction of metals and minerals that has occurred over the last 400 years. If Old Time Relijun tried to play up there, we’d probably collapse after one song due to the altitude sickness. It’s hard to even walk up a flight of stairs without taking a nap.
As for this wild band, this tour we’re about to go out on—I just want to say I really deeply reject a lot of the values I’m seeing in the “Music BUSINESS” of today right now. I’m not making my music to sell video games and shit; I want to make something that really connects with people’s sense of awe and magic and fundamental life-force. If I can’t do that, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
