Aranos: Tangomango/Bering Sea
Pieros

Tangomango and Bering Sea are remarkable for their packaging alone, and are as unique and as the artist who created them. Bohemia-born Aranos (pronounced 'aranyosh') sings and plays all manner of string instruments as well as keyboards, Chinese and Japanese flutes, and drums. A frequent collaborator with Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, David Tibet and Current 93, Aranos has recorded Traditional Irish, East European, gypsy and folk music and, live, plays violin and sings. (How eccentric is he? Apparently, he sent—at his own expense to anyone wanting it—a copy of 2001's magnificent! magnificent! no one knows the final word with the request that each listener determine its value, an honour system he devised called “experimental anarchy distribution.”)

Tangomango comes in a handmade royal purple silk purse with a beaded orange clasp and, inside, a full-colour booklet containing lyrics and photographs inserted within burlap material. While the title suggests a Can connection, the music is of a style entirely Aranos's own: a particularly surreal type of tango music, one that includes gypsy as well as Electroacoustic dimensions. The instrumental emphasis is on vocals and strings, though he boldly pushes the songs' traditional stylings into contemporary abstract realms. A song like “Chammomile Galaxies Waiting,” for example, starts in ancient folk territory but gradually transforms into a thrumming, silken mass that recalls Reich's Electric Counterpoint. The ten-minute “All the Lost Turbans Will Be on That Speaker” may be the boldest outing, with sinuous string scrapings and plucks put through a digital shredder to psychedelic effect. Admittedly, his creations can seem a mite too loony (i.e., a growling chant colliding with the intermittent intrusion of a marching band in “Broken Eights”).

Saying his singing is idiosyncratic hardly does it justice. At times a gravelly bark (“Instant Father”), other times leering and predatory (“69 Walton's Yamamoto Noodles”), his singing might remind you of resident troubadours you've encountered when traveling through remote Eastern European towns. The demented quality of the delivery is reinforced by surreal lyrics like “Miniskirted fishboats fling earth's burning head / While moist nightingale shines beneath spirit's mud” (“A Day Shot”). His fiery and impassioned string playing also deserves mention; there's no modicum of emotion or intensity in the attack he brings to “A Day Shot,” to cite one instance of many.

Bering Sea comes in a fold-out, hand-printed linocut case covered with red swirls, the disc held in place by a piece of cork, plus a brief explanation of the disc's contents on the back. Summarized, the text describes shaman training in the Inuit tradition, one part of which involves exposing oneself to extreme cold for extended periods (such as being submerged in icy water for up to three weeks). Intended as an hour-long approximation of the experience, Bering Sea is an amorphous, lumbering drone that pairs the portentous thud of muffled gongs with the glassy shimmer of cymbals and steely clatter throughout. Grinding, machine-like noises intersect with the amplified rubbing of metal sheets, and ghostly creaks, groans, and wails repeatedly surface. The work's blurry whorls sound like they're emerging from the depths of a cavernous funnel, in a manner that recalls Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic (though Thomas Köner's gong recordings Nunatak Gongamour and Teimo are a closer analogue in general). Bering Sea continues in this manner for almost an hour yet surprisingly sustains interest. Even more startlingly, at the 58-minute mark a rustic folk song emerges. It's played backwards, however, and consequently the guitars resemble sitars and the vocals assume an exotic, even alien quality. Three minutes later, the backwards treatment vanishes, exposing a more conventional folk song featuring banjo, guitar, and a slightly grizzled voice chanting “Up in the Bering Sea” before the piece fades away. The shift from abstract soundscaping to folk song may be startling but the coda roots the piece geographically in effective manner.

Despite their modernist tendencies, both albums—and Aranos himself—seem largely out of time, removed from the normal business of digital downloads and mercurial trend-making and existing in peculiar universes of their own making. Certainly one wagers that our aural landscape must be expansive enough for Aranos's unusual vision to be accommodated too.

May 2005