IV

Avarus is another band from my home country, which I learned to know from live concert stages instead of records. The first of these experiences was from a commemoration party of a Kallio-district's small comic, book & record store Pitkämies, where it took for me quite long time to realize that the band is not doingtheir sound check, but already playing their random music set. I also saw their hypnotic and more coherent stage performances, when they were warming up Acid Mother's Temple at Nosturi in October 2012, and when sharing Hectorock club with Esa Kotilainen and Hazard Wings at Lepakkomies in April 2013. These gigs motivated me to search their records from the metropolitan area libraries, and I learned the group's discography varying from more loosely crafted cd-r recordings to vinyl LP's with more piety allocated to their production process.

These vinyl sides flow freely over three unnamed cuts, gliding first upon pleasant variations on swarming figures of a rhythmic jungle. This vividly inhabited landscape is borne from soft beatings of electric guitar, primitive percussions and form giving bass lines. The improvisation focuses unrelenting to its minimal one-note "dismelodics", emphasizing on minor variations of intensity and myriad shifting details of the motley surface covering this solid compositional entity. On few smoother moments and fade-outs the building blocks of this sonic wall are easier to specify, revealing subtle aural tapestries of either cosmic synthesizers or electronic treatments. The second impression is slightly more neurotic with unstable rhythm elements and rusty guitar awesomeness. Menacing beating noises give associations of the most brutal late 1960's krautrock pioneer tapings, here only with a better sound quality and more modern instrumentation. The second side of the album dives to sea of dreamy crystalline sound forms, peeling different layers of musicians' innovations about possibilities on abstract voice constellations. The rhythm power stays mostly on ethereal ambient level, enforcing the surreal landscape qualities of the composition, and smoothen the shamanist characteristics of the first side. Only on last minutes the album gets closed by raw guitar riff smashing and wild percussion beating, reaching a stepless surge of power until disappearing to the void, where this vinylful of abstract stimulations originally emerged.

I believe one aspect on modern days underground movement's agenda is to keep the releases available only to more selected markets, concert attendees, friends and people the band might consider pleasant. I think this is in a way fun approach, allowing the members of the collective to keep some sort of control to the aura of awareness about their artistic expression. Anybody interested of obscure adventures in sonic trance mechanics within organic vintage current might be blessed, if being allowed to get immersed in this perimeter of arctic avantgarde logics. I do not detect standing within that circle myself, but feel comfort from warmth of its flames, and admire these stimulating architectural details from my proper sociological position.