Aranos has always been reliably unpredictable and this strange, disorienting, and difficult new album will do nothing to dispel that perception. It begins as a cerebral drone work, but Surrounded by Hermits gradually escalates (degenerates?) into Dadaist cabaret, absurdist noise, and mischievous buffoonery with characteristic anarchic glee.
There are a number of pretty unique things about Surrounded by Hermits (aside from, of course, Aranos himself). For one, it is packaged in a handmade wood and burlap case. Secondly, it contains some rather unusual instrumentation, even for the experimental music genre. For example, the droning opening segment (“Yaoowaah”) is played on a bowed gong filtered through a wah-wah pedal. Aranos’s beautifully sad violin playing, on the other hand, appears quite seldom. That was a bit disappointing for me, but it is an admittedly pretty ballsy move for him to avoid relying on his greatest strength and instead attempt to carry the melodic weight of an album with seashells and gongs. Also, of course, it should be noted that this album follows a singularly warped and confounding trajectory. Aranos did not take the easy road anywhere on this album.
Surrounded by Hermits is essentially one very long piece split into 16 separate tracks that uninterruptedly segue into one another. Many of the segments are quite brief and very few constitute distinct songs, so the transitions are generally quite seamless. The first half of the album takes quite a subdued and somewhat meditative tone, as the opening gong piece is followed by a series of interludes populated with somber pianos, mournful conch shell moans, chittering insectoid noises, queasy microtonally shifting drones, discordant flugelhorns, and beds of whooshing and whirring electronics. This early eccentric ambience does little to hint at some of the material that appears later in the album.
As alluded to above, of course, things gradually take a turn towards the very weird (even by avant-garde standards). I suppose the bottom officially begins to drop out with the commencement of the eighth segment, “Some Feeling.” While it marks the first appearance of both relatively conventional musicality and Aranos’s gypsy-tinged violin playing, it is also frequently disrupted by loud sighs and recordings of a Shakespeare rehearsal overlapped to the point of incomprehensibility. Things return to deceptive tameness for a little while afterwards though. In fact, the lurching strings of “Wwroomah” are actually somewhat beautiful before they are electronically splintered and enveloped in rumbling. However, that piece transitions into the lunatic cabaret of “Mekanik Mik,” which is followed by more disjointed Shakespearean chaos, then the absolutely ridiculous, improbable, and crazy drum machine funk of “Tudumtudam.”
It is surprising that the album continues after that frenzied, noisy, genre mash-up, but it does somehow. In fact, Surrounded by Hermits' brief denouement actually yields one of its clear highlights, the fiery violin showcase of “Ooaahh/Loadooda,” before drawing to a hushed close with the lengthy piano dirge of “Plinkplonk.”
Hermits is certainly a worthy addition to Aranos’s already rather aberrant and uncompromising back catalog, but it probably is not a good starting place for those new to his work. This is definitely an unabashedly self-indulgent and deranged album, but it is also quite a wild and fiercely iconoclastic one.
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