Old Time Relijun

I remember vividly the first time I saw Arrington De Dionyso of Old Time Relijun perform. After a half-hour of bashing a cheap electric guitar and skronking and squawking on his bass clarinet, the then-solo performer began to do something remarkable: he started to throat-sing, beatbox and play a jew’s harp all at the same time. It was amazing. The eerie, droning, springing, hypnotic sounds that emanated from the performer were like nothing I had ever seen, and to this day Dionyso’s feat remains as a personal live music milestone.
    Arrington De Dionyso and the rest of Old Time Relijun — double-bassist Aaron Hartman, drummer Germaine Baca and saxophonist Benjamin Hartman — are currently touring in support of their new album, Catharsis in Crisis (K Records). The herky-jerky, wild-eyed dancing likely to occur might just put those bible-thumping Southern Pentecostal snake handlers to shame. They’ve got nothing on this relijun.

Even though you’ve been performing for years, the way you shout out “Old Time Relijun!” at the beginning of Catharsis in Crisis makes it seem kinda like you’re reintroducing the band. Do you feel that Catharsis in Crisis is in some way a reintroduction to Old Time Relijun?
Hmmm… When we were making the album, even at the very beginning of the recording process I think we just kinda had this sort of moment where we looked at each other and said, “I think we have something here.” We’ve enjoyed recording all of our albums and they’ve been very important to us and a part of the big picture of the creative process, but I do think this album is going to be the thing… Of course it’s going to be very consistent with people who’ve been fans for a long time, they are going to eat it up, right? But I think this album’s gonna bring a lot of new people in. I think it’s a great way to reintroduce ourselves.

What is it about Catharsis in Crisis that you feel is gonna bring more people in who have not experienced Old Time Relijun before?
It may just be a timing thing. It may just be a critical mass factor where mainstream music is getting to be so unsatisfying in so many ways that people might be a little more willing to go along with us. Or perhaps it’s something about the music itself. Being a little more…it’s a little bit more direct in what it’s communicating. Musically speaking, perhaps it’s saying something a little more directly that people might respond to more easily.



What kind of ideas were you trying to get across with Catharsis in Crisis, and indeed with the whole Lost Light Trilogy together?
Well, it’s not easy to explain… People sort of use rock music to sing about love or sing about sex or sing about what they want, and there’s always elements of these kinds of more traditional topics in our songs here and there, [but] I wanted to see how deeply I can go into writing rock music about transcendence and about…I think the word “spirituality” is sort of a tricky word to use. I’m not sure how to say it… There’s kind of a reaching towards a cosmic unity that’s happening, and then over the course of the trilogy, it’s a three-part series that’s kind of like a birth-death-rebirth cycle of self-knowledge and intuition. It kind of takes the traditional motifs of the journey of the shaman hero, journey of transformation, but it kind of tells the story out of order in more of a, shall we say, post-modern approach to storytelling where each piece of the trilogy, each song is referential towards other songs in the trilogy. So it’s like this big sort of ancient, very universal story, but it’s told in a way that’s sort of out of order.

Kind of like how people like Pinchbeck talk about time being not linear, so your storytelling doesn’t need to be either? For me, I think of time as linear, I’m afraid I’m trapped in that model.
Yeah, I guess we’re striving to transcend that model or at least play with the plasticity of that approach. I guess I’m also interested in the idea of alternate universes and alternate dimensions. There could be an infinite number of universes that are sort of layered on top of each other, kind of alternate dimensions. It’s sort of a sci-fi idea, but it’s also something that physicists are interested in debating long hours into the night. This is just my small and humble way to try to understand that by using music — like a guitar riff would be in one song, and then we’ll sort of have that same guitar riff played upside down that makes another song, and then there are a lot of lyrical juxtapositions where a certain phrase from one song will also be repeated…like the chorus of one song might just be a reference in another song, so there’s a lot of hidden tricks that go throughout it, like a labyrinth.     

While there’s a lot to wrap your head around as a listener — the odd sounds, conceptual lyrical ideas and jagged tonalities, at least jagged in terms of pop music — the beat is still dance-y. It hasn’t always been that way. How necessary is it for you now to set your music to a danceable beat, to have that sort of interaction with
the listener?
You know, it’s kind of a funny thing because I always thought we were making dance music. What kind of happened, I think, is what I considered to be dance music was something that was so far out and far away from what other people would consider danceable, that it just sort of caught up with us, so to speak. I’ve heard a very similar response from people who’ve asked me that, [laughs] and my reaction’s always like “What are you talking about? All of our records are danceable, I’ve always been dancing to this kind of shit!” Maybe I think I have the rest of the band to thank for laying down some rhythms that are slightly more familiar to the public, that translate as danceable music in the more traditional sense perhaps. I mean, in my universe, Old Time Relijun is pop music in this very expansive, beautiful, transcendent way. But of course to the people who tend to consume what most of the world considers pop music, it’s like what we were saying, it’s pop music in a very far away alternate
dimension perhaps.

Like in the dimension that I fall asleep and wake up in, people groove to Justin Timberlake, but in another universe they groove to Old Time Relijun?   
Yeah, I think so [laughs].  That’s the reality that I’m living in anyway.

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