Arrington de Dionyso Interview: Shouting Into The Void (w/ Full Album Stream, Lyrical Analysis & Translations)

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Celestial Views

Malaikat dan Singa translates into English as “Angels and Lions,” setting the intention for a project that is symbolically rich. With implications that place it in the realm of both the celestial and terrestrial, Malaikat dan Singa celebrates the dualistic nature of existence. Dionyso shares some potential references found in the project’s name, listing: “Sex and spirit? Spiritual love and fiery lust? Balance and aggression? Pairs of opposites? Alchemical reference? Dream diary? Tarot reading? Expression of the extremes of human experience?”

Such dualities form a large part of what inspires Dionyso, alongside mystical Jewish texts like the Zohar and the abstract poetry of William Blake. Those literary sources, used prominently throughout Dionyso’s work, explore what he calls “an axis between particularity and infinity, between totality and nothingness.” They are sources which both help define and describe his life curiosities.

“There are many, many levels and layers of creation and destruction being dealt with both in Kabbalistic thought and in Blake’s mysticism. That is what I am interested in exploring myself,” he says.

Malaikat dan Singa’s first record was released in 2009, written to impress a American woman who had been residing in Indonesia. Yet given the ferociously carnal nature of the record, one not privy to that knowledge would never suspect it to be romantic at all. Malaikat dan Singa may initially have been inspired by romantic love, but sweeps right over human emotions to encompass much more significant issues. Dionyso describes the songs as “love songs to infinity — love songs to the entire universe and whatever void lies beyond it.”

Released in 2011, Malaikat dan Singa’s second album, Suara Naga, continues to step outside of the individual to examine the splendor of the infinite. Dionyso serves as the vessel through which creation comes rushing forth, and as such, all aspects of him as a carnal being intertwine so closely with his creations that they are difficult to separate.

“I could say that for me, sex, magic, god, spirit, and psychic fire are all intertwined and distinguishable only at the most subtle levels. I think that the urge of desire as a creative force that drives the expansion and contraction of the stars, galaxies, and the universe at large is an important meditation,” he explains, albeit with some difficulty.

By the time Dionyso began writing material for Suara Naga, the relationship which originally inspired the project had just terminated. Nonetheless, Dionyso insists that “neither of these albums could really be said to be about a person, or a relationship, or any particular thing… [The relationship was] just what was going on in my personal life, but I don’t really think that writing songs about your personal life is really interesting when you are concerned with the entire Universe, Space, and Time, etc. — except as much as one person’s personal experience of life might be a single point reflecting the blazing light of that Totality.”

“Who gives a damn about my personal expression — whether I’m happy or had a bad day,” he adds bluntly. “I’m not interested in singing about that kind of shit. I want to confront existence itself; I want to shout into the infinite void.”

Earthly Passions

The world of independent pop music is currently inundated with acts self-identifying as “tribalist” or “primitivist” in their sound. Polyrhythmic compositions and nontraditional percussion have moved from being the stuff of “world music” to being the trendy fodder of experimental pop. Yet despite its multicultural influences and thundering rhythms, Malaikat dan Singa is a project which transcends the trendy co-option of “world” sounds and evades easy labeling. Dionyso has developed a huge artillery of musical influences via his longstanding ethnomusicological bent. Accordingly, his particular breed of sonic polyculturalism is a unique and elaborate collage fit for a true scholar.

“What is world music? Is there any way of being influenced by music that is not from this world?” he questions confidently.

“There is very little in my music that can be identified as coming directly from a specific cultural location — combinations of sounds are no different to me than combinations of colors,” he continues, likening music to visual art. “If you use a certain shade of red with yellow, that will evoke to many people a popular fast food restaurant, or it will evoke the national flag of several different nations. But it might just be a red thing next to a yellow thing. So [it is with] a certain kind of guitar sound within a certain kind of drum beat, with reed instruments playing a certain way, or singing with a particular emphasis…”

“My own musical choices are going to be informed by every single piece of music I have ever heard, and everything that I can possibly imagine, whether I know how to play it or not. This to me is the triumph of the human imagination,” he concludes.

Malaikat dan Singa may seem to the unacquainted as a project which reinterprets traditional Indonesian music or makes references to Southeast Asian spirituality, but such is not the case. “Malaikat dan Singa has really nothing to do with specific Indonesian cultural expressions at all,” Dionyso assures. “I just use the language; we aren’t doing Indonesian music… [but] there are correspondences because all of the peoples of the world are all human. As a whole, human beings gravitate towards certain modalities of expression, regardless of cultural specificity.”

In fact, careful dissection of Malaikat dan Singa’s music will ascertain that its prominent influences have less to do with Indonesia and more to do with the aforementioned literary influences and musical influences like classic rock and roll, Tuvan throatsinging, and Jamaican dancehall.

“I really like dancehall music, especially when the singers kind of start rap-chanting with very strange vocal inflections and aggressive textures that remind me of throatsinging,” says Dionyso, “but a lot of the lyrical content really frustrates me. What a brilliant musical form, yet a lot of these songs are kind of the same old shit — bitching about bitches and hoes kinda stuff, glorifying rude behavior and what not… or they are very specific to time and place and not really relevant outside of a very limited cultural context.”

Dionyso decided to engage with these frustrations by combining the qualities of dancehall, throatsinging, and rock and roll that interest him with Indonesian, a language chosen for linguistic properties Dionyso had long been searching for.

“I have taken a lot of inspiration from both Blake and Kabbalah for many years; both have informed a lot of my past work with Old Time Relijun, too. However, when I started working with these rhythms, I found that having to work in English was not really fitting with the mode of expression I was searching for with this project. I thought about using some Blake quotes in Spanish and decided that wasn’t really working for me, either,” recalls Dionyso.

With Indonesian, Dionyso took an approach not unlike that of a rapper searching for the right lyrical cadences. He “sampled” from Blake and the Zohar, using them as what he calls “a springboard from which to leap into pure Imagination Unsnared.” He researched sound profiles of various groupings of Indonesian words and their meanings, sometimes using the rhythmic musicality of the language to form free-associated blocks of sound.

“The songs are written in Indonesian based on things I might want to say, but the words have to possess an inherent musicality,” Dionyso describes. “I’m also looking for more esoteric kinds of connections in the lyrics, and playing with things that can’t really be translated because it is the sound itself of the words being pronounced that drives the song forward.”

Dionyso explains that certain Indonesian phrases can mean “five or six different things, depending on context.” The language’s contextual vagueness and loose grammatical structure allow him much flexibility in “searching for anagrams and words between words, following the flow in sounds, and taking previously unseen pathways.” Simply put, the language plays nicely with Dionyso’s improvisational songwriting tendencies, which ebb and flow like so many cycles of creation and destruction.

When Dionyso’s abundance of esoteric literary, metaphysical, musical, and cultural influences coalesce, Malaikat dan Singa is what emerges. It is the sound of time-tested musical genres being imbued with spiritually-fresh air.

“It’s Surrealist Shamanism meets Gangsta Rap,” says Dionyso. “I’m just going off about my mojo like everybody else; I just like to throw it down in cosmic terms. It’s all about shape-shifting, having visions of worlds unseeable.”

www.myspace.com/arringtondedionyso

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