Biography
Aarni: "A spirit or dragon, which is believed to be lying on top of buried treasure. Aarni is seen cleaning and polishing his mouldy treasures in forests and on hill-slopes; often he is heard clinking his gold crowns when he is favourable to some melancholic worshipper of money. [Aarni's] temple was a room in an ash-grove, where trees never sprouted leaves...birds did not sing on the branches; only a few ravens built their nests on them. There magpies cackled, wolves howled and owls hooted. Shepherds did not bring their flocks there for the ground was unwholesome. The air was heavy in the vicinity of the grove. At night strange apparitions were seen there."
- Kristfrid Ganander, Mythologia Fennica
Aarni (not to be confused with the Austrian Oaf) can also be taken to signify the Shadow archetype of Jungian analytical psychology and the demon Choronzon of Hermetic parlance. 'Aarni' has a Gematric value of 262. Used as a prefix in Finnish the word can have a number of meanings, for example "ancient untouched forest" and "will-o-the-wisp".
Some sources (mostly people who like to call themselves music journalists) have described Aarni's music variably as 'almost orthodox doom metallish Lovecraftian-Jungian Kalevala avant-garde', 'progressive doom metal', 'Yanni with distorted guitars', 'primitive black metal', 'underground progressive rock', 'shit', 'space doom metal' and 'original as fuck'. The band itself occasionally uses terms like 'Chthonic Hybrid Musick (pronounced "moo-sik")', 'Antinomian Music', 'Maybe Music', 'Noise For Futants' and 'Dream Torrent Music'. Sound confusing? Welcome to the club!
Aarni strives to avoid using needless amounts of traditional song-structures, homogenous parts and other such widespread conventions and restrictions in its music. Probably the band functions as therapy to its members: Aarni's output could be described as a stream of their unrepressed conscious and unconscious content. Therefore some Aarni songs may seem hard to grasp to listeners who have grown accustomed to the conventional song-structures and general musical uninnovativeness rife in most of contemporary music.
Some of the themes in Aarni's music may be A) Finnish folklore and paganism as the band views them B) the occult and world mythologies, brain-change, Discordianism, collective & personal liberation and theories of analytical psychology (especially those of C.G. Jung) C) The Cthulhu mythos as described by H.P. Lovecraft and fellow authors (sometimes possibly handled with a slight tongue-in-cheek approach) and D) Topics not included in the above categories.
The band occasionally likes to see its message (if any) as being anti-state, anti-religion, anti-ideology and anti-anti.
Aarni's lyrics take form in the language believed most suitable for the song's subject: usually in Finnish, Classical Latin or English and occasionally in French, Ancient Egyptian, Glossolalic, et cetera. Some persistent rumours also mention Enochian and Swedish.
The band's story began in the autumn of 1998 ev, when Markus Marjomaa quit a local "gothic metal" band called Inevitable due to the usual artistic conflicts common to mammalian musicians. Master M., who had founded Inevitable and held the position of its lead guitarist and co-composer, began solitarily developing his musical ideas further. Soon Comte de Saint-Germain appeared to him and immediately joined Aarni. When the two gentlemen conducted an unsuccessful necromantic ritual at Moominpappa's cenotaph, a third member's addition to the band took place: Doomintroll. Simultaneously the first letter of M.M.'s surname semi-accidentally flipped over completing his mutation into Master Warjomaa.
The fourth band member does not really act as a "proper" musician, but seems nonetheless to partake in Aarni's creative processes. For Mistress Palm seems in fact composed entirely of artificial, phlogiston-driven rectoplasm and due to her apparently incorporeal nature can only exist on a computer's hard disk. |
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Aarni currently resides on a primitive planet named 'Earth' by some of its past primate inhabitants.
Do you believe all that?
Lineup
Master Warjomaa
Comte de Saint-Germain
Doomintroll
Mistress Palm
Discography
Bathos (Firebox Records, 2004)
Aarni/Umbra Nihil split CD (Firebox Records, 2002)
Duumipeikon Paluu (promo, 2002)
Demo 2001 (demo, 2001)
Samples
Contact
HOMEPAGE: www.aarni.info
E-MAIL: Aarni |
