#primordial undermind

[dustedmagazine]

Eric Arn — fixe Idee (Carbon )

The title of Eric Arn’s latest album is guaranteed to trigger autocorrect reactions wherever French is spoken. The lack of an accent, the reversed capitalization and word order — word processing programs are probably muttering zut alors under their virtual breath. An idée fixe, in both English and French, is an obsessive idea; in psychological circles, it denotes a potentially mistaken notion that is impervious to correction.

So, just what is Arn’s hang-up? Since fixe Idee is instrumental, and the names of its tracks do not tip their hands to an obvious theme, one is left with the supposition that it has something to do with the album’s contents. The LP comprises seven solo acoustic guitar performances, but not all in the same style. This is not an American Primitive or free improv record, although elements of both methodologies and several others can be heard, sometimes within the same piece. “Bear, completely unraveled” lurches between galloping advance, scrabbling asides, and pile-ups containing bits of both like a sailor trying to stay on his feet as the deck heaves in heavy seas. On the other hand, “Impromptu pour le fantôme,” with its parade of contrasting segments whose succession suggests a narrative wreathed in mystery, is very much in the spirit of the Takoma School. And “Gutbucket” blows right past the blues implications of its name with a velocity, of not exactly a sound, that’s steeped in punk rock.

So, perhaps Arn’s unswerving obsession is that he has to deal mano-a-mano with the acoustic guitar? While fixe Idee is not his first crack at the format, Arn has waited a long time to get around to it. He first recorded in the 1980s, when he was a member of Crystalized Movements, and took his improvisational rock band, the Primordial Undermind, with him when he moved to Austria in 2005. With all that rocking out, he didn’t make a solo, mostly acoustic record until Higher Order (also on Carbon) in 2021. If this has become the thing he thinks he must do, well, it sure beats a lot of other fixed ideas going around these days.

Bill Meyer

[bestreasonstowriterecordreviews]

“...they somehow managed to provide the kind of payoffs that a planned, ordered rock song can, while allowing sheer sweet chaos to drool around the edges...” 

A NEST OF NINNIES #4 1993 (page 17)

PRIMORDIAL UNDERMIND review by SETH L. SANDERS, Editor 

Hey! ERIC ARN has been busy since 1993. In fact, he has a brand new long player (as in April 2017 for you future archivists) on Feeding Tube Records and it’s terrific! Do like Fuckin’ Record Reviews did and consider spending your discretionary income on his new record. 

[dustedmagazine]

Eric Arn — Higher Order (Carbon)

Higher Order by Eric Arn

Eric Arn has spent the last three or four decades in the service of the experimental guitar, early on as part of Wayne Rogers’ Crystallized Movements, later in his own deep droning, electrified Primordial Undermind and now in this mostly acoustic blues-folk infused set of solo material, partly improvised and partly composed. These songs run the gamut from buoyant, bucolic, fingerpicked transcendentalism to tetchy, twitchy, untethered shows of digital skill, with one space-age foray into electric guitar psychedelia at the end.

In the quieter, more melodic entries, Arn sounds a good bit like Basho, washing homespun folk melodies in a luminous mystical light. “Wer Tauben füttert, füttert Gespenster” which translates as “Whoever feeds pigeons, feeds ghosts” is perhaps the best of these, a placid, gentle rain of notes that taps into something spiritual without making too much of it. “6 or 7 Adepts” is knottier and less serene. It leaves lots of space for meditation, hazarding a spray of notes, then a pause for contemplation. We have time to consider the intervals between the music. Phrases tilt upwards like question markets and are answered by muted bursts. The piece seems like an internal inquiry, as Arn picks his way carefully through it. There is a provisional quality to the way it resolves, as if he were just deciding what it means for himself.

Elsewhere, tracks veer further from folk tradition. “Warpage in the Figures,” molds blues-y bends into abstract shapes, agitated sound running sprints, then stopping to pant and recovery. It is less melodic than the other tracks, but full of a brainy aggression; you can imagine strings being broken in its rush towards revelation.

The disc closes with “Greets the Dawn,” for someone who has admittedly not kept up all that well, the track that most recalls Arn’s work with Primordial Undermind. Here tones build slowly in vibrating atmospheres. A sense of wonder is palpable. It puts into relief how densely full of notes and ideas all the previous tracks were, and how stillness can evoke just as much as busyness.

Jennifer Kelly

[dustedmagazine]

Eric Arn—Orphic Resonance (Feeding Tube)

Eric Arn has gotten around. Over the course of a music career that has included a youthful stint in the proto-Twisted Village combo Crystalized Movements and over a quarter century helming the Primordial Undermind, he has shifted his base of operations from New England to the Bay Area, then Austin Texas, and for the past 12 years Vienna Austria. So it figures that he would latch onto Orpheus, a musician who accompanied Jason and the Argonauts. He played the lyre so loud and sweet that he drowned out the Sirens and enabled ship and crew to sail past them without steering onto the rocks. 

The story goes that Orpheus improved upon the work of the gods, perfecting an instrument that had been made by one. But he also lost his love to them by failing a test that would have allowed him to spring his dead bride from the underworld; musical skill isn’t enough to get you what you want, it seems. But Arn has been able to parlay his into over a dozen records on Strange Attractors, Camera Obscura, and Emperor Jones, as well as a handful of self-released cassettes and CDRs. But he has never made a solo LP before, and Orphic Resonance stands well away from Primordial Undermind in method and sound. Arn usually finds a posse of fellow travelers to accompany him in the Undermind as he shuttles between spaced-out rock jams and out-jazz freak-outs, but here he is truly solo and reliant mainly upon his acoustic guitar.  

Stylistically, Arn is as peripatetic as ever, and the titles he has assigned his tunes back this up. “Pas d’une Hélice” (which is French for “Not A Propeller”) leaps from jagged shapes to rushing, dissonant pile-ups; “Tepeyollotl” (named for an Aztec god of caves) is a luxuriant and winding tune that would fall easy on the ears of any Robbie Basho fan. “Es Wuchtet Gewaltig”  (German for “It Waves Violently”) showcases his bowing technique, which lures a myriad of tones out of his guitar and then sets them loose to flower and fly in a multi-hued sonic maelstrom. Only once does he opt for amplification and fuzz, which he yields to flatten the listener into a senseless trance state on “The Lure Of The Labyrinth.” On two other tracks he puts down the guitar altogether and switches to metallic chimes, which he either processes or layers with throat singing to achieve more other-worldly effects. I’ve never heard Arn sound so zonked before, but he’s damned good at it; here’s hoping he takes it even farther next time.

Bill Meyer 

[zajokakonyhabol]

[noisedroneambient-blog]

Primordial Undermind -Driftglass