Above: Arrington de Dionyso at Indonesian music festival, Jakarta, Indonesia, October, 2024
Arrington de Dionyso, multilingual visual and musical artist, returned to Olympia at the end of November after a month touring about Indonesia. He has a new album on his Bandcamp page, Unheard Indonesia vol. 17 REAK Juarta Putra with Arrington de Dionyso, recorded with Indonesian musicians who accompanied him at a Indonesian music festival in Jakarta. He will be performing with his original exploration of Indonesian sounds, Malaikat dan Singa, this Friday, January 3, 2025 at Cryptatropa in downtown Olympia.
The first song on Unheard Indonesia vol. 17 REAK Juarta Putra with Arrington de Dionyso is accompanied by a video of Arrington playing bass clarinet with several Indonesian percussionists. "That was the rehearsal we did the day before we played at this really big festival at the Jakarta Expo. It featured seven diff stages. the players are Juarta Putra, who play a type of trance music found in West Java called REAK. It's a recent hybrid tradition that is noted for being very noisy and raucous. It's a very celebratory music. It's common the dancers at a REAK performance will go in a trance, possessed by ancestral spirits and nature spirits.
The Indonesian music festival was responsible for bringing Arrington over to Indonesia; he stayed for a month and toured around the country, beginning with the festival in Jakarta. "It was a media circus. there were big stars of Indonesian music, punk bands, electronic music, experimental artists, every genre was represented. I hardly had a chance to check out the other shows there was so much setting up to do for our performance." Arrington traveled around the country performing and collaborating with local artists, ending up back in Jakarta at the end of the journey. "I did a live drawing performance at a gallery in Jakarta to end the trip."
The Malaikat dan Singa show this Friday (January 3) is also a birthday party for Arrington de Dionyso, who turns 50 years old this weekend. "It's going to be so fun. The day before my 50th birthday, and some ver special friends are performing with me. Bee Hees is led by Brahim, originally from Morocco, he's been in Olympia for eight years. Bee Hees are a mash-up of traditional Moroccan sounds with a garage rock feel. Inventive, a real crowd-pleaser.
Sounds like a party.
50 Years of Arrington de Dionyso!
Open The Crown [KLP244]
Arrington: "this is the first Malaikat dan Singa album to go between songs sung in English and Indonesin, with more songs in English. This is the most widely recognized Malaikat album due to the video for 'I Create in the Broken System' (directed by John Farinelli). This is a very poetically realized album. The lyrics to 'Open the Crown' are a mission statement, anthemic, an exploration of the deeper canyons of consciousness."