Arrington de Dionyso - Lombok Island Improvisations (RFRC)

As my long-suffering wife will tell you, I'm an impulse buyer of the highest order. The ease with which I can purchase new/used music online is a dangerous, dangerous thing for our already strained bank account.

I've had to learn through some ridiculous trial-and-error to keep my purchases small. Not in size, necessarily, but in how much I'm spending. Because of that, though, most of the things I've been picking up of late have been smaller in stature: 7"s, flexi-discs, and cassettes.

So, when Devin Gallagher, the man behind Portland label, High Scores & Records, tweeted about a new label he was starting and that its first release was going to be a cassette of music from Arrington de Dionyso (for only $5!!)...well, I had purchased a copy before the e-ink on his tweet dried.

If you're unfamiliar with de Dionyso, here's the best summary I can provide: he came up through the ranks of the Olympia punk/K Records scene playing in the terrifying blues-skronk outfit Old Time Relijun. Along the way, he started exploring the farthest reaches of the musical universe, including throat singing, ecstatic bass clarinet workouts, and with his latest group Malaikat dan Singa, spewing out thrilling incantations sung in the Indonesian language while his band engages in swirling, sensual rhythmic adventures.

Having been a fan of his for years (and having the rare pleasure of writing about him), I revere him with a guru-like fervor. I will follow him where ever he wants to lead me. And on this cassette, he takes listeners straight into the heart of Indonesia, where, as the title suggests, he improvised a series of tracks using his trusty bass clarinet.

The whole shebang is a must-hear for fans of free jazz and avant garde drones, especially the first side of the cassette, on which de Dionyso explodes out with long spirals and spatterings of melody while Gombloh, a musician that plays a double-reeded instrument called a preret, joins in the freeform fun. The tones of the two instruments don't necessarily mesh with one another, making for an interesting juxtaposition of sounds. There were times where I thought Devin had passed me a tape that he had used a few dozen times already and the ghosts of previous recording sessions were still audible in the mix. Add to it that each player appears to keep to his own ideas with little disregard to what the other is doing. To you that may sound like chaos; to these ears, it is glorious noise.