Transfixiatio

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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.