Aranos’s new long-form opus may be a bit lacking in his characteristic eccentricity, but it maintains his usual high standards of adventurousness, difficulty, and oblique conceptuality. While ostensibly a drone piece, the tone is much less meditative than I expected. Instead, Crow Eye Hint is a nakedly experimental and exploratory work for much of its duration, focusing on both negative space and the acoustic properties of misused pianos and clashing tones. Also, it gets pretty scary.
Crow Eye Hint is definitely an album that requires headphones or extreme volume to be fully appreciated. The main reason for this is the subtlety of its lengthy opening, which just sounds like sporadic, arrhythmic whooshing and creaking noises when listened to casually. Deeper focus reveals that those whooshes are merely the attack of notes that have been reversed (the tip of the iceberg, so to speak). Much quieter, but much more engrossing, is the murky hum and dynamic swelling of the notes’ backwards decay as Aranos calmly plucks and manipulates the piano wire.
Perhaps sensing that the piece was in grave danger of succeeding as an ambient work, Aranos impishly detonates the reverie after a few minutes with a brief and violent flurry of discordant, conventionally played notes. The microcosmically waxing sound world returns yet again, but with a looming sense of disquiet, as it is now clear that another explosion of dissonance is likely to occur without warning. It doesn’t happen immediately though, and the swelling reversed notes gradually increase in tension and power as Aranos increases the volume and puts the piano’s sustain pedal to work. The effect is quite a visceral one, as the rumbling bass notes begin as a diffuse thrum beneath a nimbus of treated flaps and flutters, but slowly snowball and cohere before roaring and tearing into the aural foreground. After about ten minutes, the long-awaited jarring flurry of notes finally hits once again, but is a little tamer this time and carries with it an entirely new direction.
At this point, Aranos begins playing the piano with the actual keys, but things remain far from conventional. Using the sustain pedal and a single rapidly played note, he creates a woozy, quavering shimmer that he buffets with various amplified thumps and an insistently repeating, oddly chosen tone. Glacially, the tremulous underlying drone increases steadily in depth and density while remaining melodically static until abruptly opening up into a lush, string-enhanced pastoral vista.
The second half of this 54-minute work remains relatively entrenched in that droning vein, which is slightly more listener friendly than that which preceded it. At the very least, it achieves and maintains a distinct flow. However, the placid atmosphere dissipates pretty quickly, as the pulse intensifies and the violins begin to grow more nightmarish and discordant. The piece ultimately becomes quite a harrowing and grotesque caricature of the fleeting oasis of bliss that earlier emerged as its center. That tense and disturbing atmosphere, however, eventually gives way to an eerily throbbing and moaning denouement before finally concluding, appropriately enough, on the surge of a single backwards note.
Crow Eye Hint is a very nuanced, engrossing, and intriguingly structured work and probably one of the best things that I have heard from Aranos. It certainly took me some time and effort to fully absorb and embrace this album, but it was well worth it once I did. Perhaps cognizant of the demanding nature and delayed gratification inherent in such a piece, Aranos has made the album available as a free download for more trepidatious listeners, but the handmade wood, canvas, and woodcut packaging of the actual CD is an endearingly personal touch.
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