Saturday, July 31, 2010

Aarni - Bathos

Your host likes to keep his beloved readers on their collectives toes and tentacles, so let's see how just far out we can go tonight, shall we? Aarni, Finnish one-man experimental prog-folk-doom, sings of matters esoteric and inscrutable, drifting spectrally across windswept mushroomscapes, transversing from choral chug-a-lug metal riffs directly into extended flute sections, chanting, grunting, whispering mad things, and harmonizing with himself in an ouroboros loop of strangeness. The guitar is tinny and swathed in sheets of effects and hiss, the drum are barely audible and erratic, the lyrics swerve between fractured English, Latin, and Finnish, and song structure is arbitrary and labyrinthine. In other words: a treasure, a maddening artifact smuggled from a different plane of existence. Also, possibly the only metal album with maracas. Charmingly, Aarni takes its name from the Finnish spirit who floats above buried treasure, clinking his gold coins and cackling.
"Visit the innermost of the earth and by rectifying what is there, you will find the hidden stone."

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