Hugs and Kisses, The Outbursts of Everett True: Old Time Relijun

It's a return late Monday engagement from Everett True, publisher of Plan B. Last week, he dove into Stolen Recordings. This week, he writes about his mail. Send him more things to write about at everett@planbmag.com. Read all his Sound of the City columns here.

Arrington De Dionyso

Hugs and Kisses

This week: The fundamentalists have taken over Olympia

DOWNLOAD
Old Time Relijun, "Indestructible Life" (MP3)
Arrington De Dionyso, "Breath of Fire (Part Two)" (MP3)

You gotta love this job sometimes.

Few weeks back, frantically finishing up my albums column for the new Plan B--excellent new releases from Mekons, Monster Bobby, Adrian Orange & Her Band--I was scrabbling around for the new Old Time Relijun album Catharsis In Crisis (K). Couldn't find it anywhere: remembered its invigorating, nasty squalls of saxophone and malignant, festering beat courtesy of gemstone producer Steve Fisk, certainly recalled Arrington de Dionyso's demented foghorn of an Old Testament voice (something like Mark Stewart of The Pop Group might have produced once upon a time, only even more electrifying), but couldn't find the damn CD. In despair, I emailed the PR, pleading for another copy--and also the other two-thirds of Lost Light three-CD trilogy this album was supposed to complete.

I'd first been made aware of Dionyso's elemental, libidinous Yes Wave dance group-- "This is a war cry! Can you hear it?"--living back out in Seattle almost a decade back, winding up easily roused Yanks with a few chosen barbs at The Stranger ("You smell exactly like my brother's asshole", etc), digging the groove of Old Tim Relijun's Olympia studio, Dub Narcotic and OTR's brother-sister groups The Microphones and ICU, entirely roused by Dub Narcotic engineer Calvin Johnson's laconic, sexually-charged storytelling, both a cappella and acoustic, lamenting the way folk seem to always ignore the wealth of talent on their own doorstep. I wrote that Old Time Relijun's 1999 album Uterus And Fire, "Revived fond memories of Pere Ubu's early Rough Trade singles," to which someone replied, "This sounds more like somebody torturing a diarrheic goat on the rack," which I didn't take to necessarily be an insult (and, anyway, is far more appropriate a description for Dionyso's throat-singing and bass clarinet-mangling on his relentless, brilliant solo album, 2005's Breath Of Fire). Since then, they'd drifted in and out of focus--as old, slightly worrying friends have a tendency to do--but this new album really knocked me for six. And then I lost the damn thing.

So. You really gotta love this job sometimes. Earlier today, arrived back from the Spring Hill Barn Farm with my two-year-old son Isaac to find a US-franked parcel unceremoniously stuffed behind the plant pot on my doorstep. Inside were several CDs --most of them decorated with chunky, bold, naive art that recalls Jack Kirby's muscle-laden superheroes of the early Sixties, pedagogic Greek sculpture and Daniel Johnston's felt-tip visions of dystopia--and an A3 black and white gig poster advertising a triple bill (Aa, Old Time Relijun and Zorastvooktie), adorned by a picture of a man in a unicorn mask suckling on a naked woman's breast.
On the back of the poster, Dionyso had scrawled (in un-joined small capital letters):