When Arrington de Dionyso was a 13-year-old living in the
colorless doldrums of Spokane, Washington, he met a homeless street
musician who told him something he would never forget: “You’re a lion,
not a lamb.” He’s been striving to transcend the herded life ever
since. At 14, he too played street corners, slapping on his guitar and
singing loud. At Evergreen State College in 1995, he shared shards of
the songs that began on the street, formed a band, and named it Old
Time Relijun.
His unexpected and creatively complex songs are a testament to what
the homeless man pointed out years ago: He is indeed much more a leader
than a follower. “I was a lonely child in junior high so I spent a lot
of time listening to music,” de Dionyso said recently by phone. “I
didn’t have any scene or group of friends so I went down to the library
and checked out stack after stack of vinyl.”
Brought up in a family that has “no music aptitude or interest in
music whatsoever,” de Dionyso didn’t set out to make music. Rather,
having spent much of his formative years in, as he calls it, “a
theatric brat phase,” he is a performer at heart and songwriter by
default. “Playing on the streets you have to have cassettes to sell so
I made some tapes,” he explains, “which led me to getting a four-track
which led to experimenting with multi-tracking and finding sound
objects.”
For de Dionyso, music is about more than arranging notes around a
good beat. Instead, music is a channel for discovery and growth. A
former language student of Spanish and French (he had intended on
teaching), de Dionyso is interested in how art translates across space.
“I was never concerned with contemporary fashion; I wanted to make
something that moves across time and place,” he says.
It’s hard to determine just what the four-member band sounds like. A
messy amalgam of folk, jazz, and noise maybe? Unbound to genre, scenes,
or geography, Old Time Relijun’s songs are free to travel, feeling big
and worldly all the while. Their newest offering, Catharsis in
Crisis, is the final installment in a trilogy that began a few
years back. “It’s about individualization through the creative journey
of the hero, or the shaman, and using mythology as psychology,” de
Dionyso explains. “It’s rooted in these ideas that tell a story out of
order, roughly about birth, death, and rebirth and about striving for
transcendence and confronting demons.”
Is that all? Not exactly: “Dreams, reinterpretations of my studies
of Kabala, William Blake, and Walt Whitman—there’s quite a bit of
source material thrown in.”
Recorded with Steve Fisk at Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Studio,
Catharsis in Crisis was arranged to shift perspectives through
repetition. “In this song there is a little motif and then we would
take it into another song and make it the riff,” de Dionyso says. “Or
we’d have a horn section in one song mirroring a vocal line from
another.
“It’s like a cubic painting that gives you many different viewpoints
all at once,” he continues. “I strive for reaching transcendence
through sound and music and broadening dimensions—there’s a
searching at the core of it all.”
And, surely, quite a lion’s roar as well.