Aranos: And Soon Coffin Sings
Pieros

Nurse With Wound and Current 93 associate Aranos (pronounced 'aranyosh') periodically surfaces with what one knows will be something unusual, and his latest is no different in that regard. Issued on his own Pieros label, And Soon Coffin Sings' three exercises in experimental electro-acoustic music run together, forming a singular, seventy-two-minute epic; if the disc's contents are unique, so too is the pentagon-shaped cardboard packaging and its silk-screened colour pattern that spreads open to reveal the disc within.

During the ten-minute opener “36 Overgrown Umbrellas,” ghostly violin scrapes and slow-motion buzzing noises drift through the air amidst faint gong-like sounds produced by metallic sheets. A sense of desolation pervades the space, its slow-motion array of sounds hallucinatory, disorienting, and evocative. Eerie, high-pitched whistles then swoop through the even more disturbed “Rocky Windows in Glum Horizons,” with the unsettling clomp of heavy footsteps tightening the noose further. Conventional time feels suspended throughout the album, no more so than during the forty-minute “Drops of Golden Clams Transcended Seething Blue Craters.” On this strangest stop on the journey, Aranos uses a presumed battery of instruments to generate animal grunts and sniffing while the occasional trace of a rickety piano appears in the background, vainly trying to impose some semblance of normalcy. Relax, though, the barnyard gathering eventually disperses, enabling glacial drones and soft slivers to claim the spotlight for the remaining twenty-five minutes. Yes, And Soon Coffin Sings is a peculiar trip, but that hardly surprise listeners familiar with Aranos's past work.

December 2005