Arrington de Dionyso

The aim of the Experimental Music Festival was to let people know that it was okay to be a total freak. I wanted there to be some sense of unity and community for anybody making “weirdo music.”

Markly Morrison

Olympia musician, podcast producer, music promoter. working group member and editor for the Olympia Music History Project

Arrington de Dionyso

Olympia musician and visual artist

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Arrington de Dionyso interviewed by Markly Morrison on February 7, 2025

Arrington recalls his musical development growing up, finding community at Evergreen and K Records, his band Old Time Relijun, and the origins of the Olympia Experimental Music Festival.

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Olympia Music History Project

Arrington de Dionyso

Interviewed by Markly Morrison

Recorded at Markly’s office in Olympia, WA on February 7, 2025

Markly Morrison

For the Olympia Music History Project. I'm Markly Morrison. I'm speaking today with Arrington de Dionyso on Friday, February 7th, 2025. Arrington, would you like to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about who you are and what you do? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Well, golly… I was born in 1992, and I've been making music since before I moved here. I did a lot of busking when I lived in Spokane for high school, taking my guitar downtown and just singing and hollering at the top of my lungs. I got a little bit of a reputation for doing that in Spokane, and that was pretty cool.

Then, I started life at the Evergreen State College. I started some bands… Old Time Religion, and then later on, Malaikat dan Singa. I did a lot of touring with those bands, and started organizing festivals and things. The [Olympia] Experimental Music Festival started in, I believe it was 1995. I play bass clarinet, throat singing, guitar, mouth harps, flutes, a bunch of other stuff. I'm also a painter. I make paintings.

Markly Morrison 

Do you want to talk a little bit about your upbringing, pre-adolescence formative years? You were in Spokane?

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah, well my family, we moved around a bit. So I was actually born in Chicago in 1975. And I went to the nation's first fully bilingual immersion public elementary school. So everybody in my school was learning English and Spanish at the same time. And that was really a special program, kind of revolutionary. I wish more public schools would do that. But there's a lot of cultural immersion. I think most of my classmates spoke more Spanish at home than English, but everybody was kind of trying to meet each other halfway. And I feel like that process of translation and linguistic immersion had a lot to do with molding my worldview in myriad ways. , I'm always kind of trying to mediate those liminal spaces between different cultures and borders, metaphorically and practically. So my dad and my mom were both ministers, first with the Evangelical Covenant Church, then with the Methodist Church. When I was nine we moved to Arkansas, they sent my dad to open up this new church, and it was kind of a failure, so then he had to switch his affiliation and become Methodist to get a job at this other church.

Markly Morrison

Was there a lot of paperwork for that?

Arrington de Dionyso 

Yeah, it was a big deal at the time. I mean, he had to get recertified because the Methodists had a more rigorous program that you gotta go through. But they let him be a minister while getting those certifications so that he could still work and earn money for the family. In Arkansas, I was part of a children's theater program that was run by the Arkansas Art Center, and that was a really big deal for me as a young person. They had this really immersive theater camp. It was a fully equipped, very professional theater. They did a lot of training in every aspect of acting, movement. There was even a costume design class, but there was also a lot of emphasis on improvisation- meaning, of course, acting improvisation. But this is kind of an important part of the story for later on. Considering where we were, in the middle of Arkansas, it was a very radical program. Us unknowing 10, 11, 12 year olds were being exposed to a lot of really incredible pushing-on-avant-garde perspectives, and how you create and shape theater and the legacies and the lineages behind that history and all that. The people that they had teaching those programs, a lot of them were into some pretty, cutting edge approaches to creating theater and that rubbed off on us. But when we moved to Spokane, there wasn't. I was like, “Where's the children's theater programs? I want to get involved in acting and want to do all this. I wanna keep doing theater.” 

Markly Morrison

How old are you at this point? 

Arrington de Dionyso 

I was 12, and yeah, we moved. And It was kind of a traumatic move,  I was just starting to really make a lot of really close friends…you know, that's an age when your sense of self is really shaping a lot. Then suddenly we moved. I didn't know anybody, and Spokane is a pretty different culture than Arkansas or Chicago is. Actually, I found it pretty homogenous- just a lot of kids with crew cuts. And at that time, people would come to school with Oliver North t-shirts. Like, whoa! It was just normal to be so right wing and conservative and that just was not my bag at all. My parents were very much “U.S. out of El Salvador,” you know. They were active in liberation political and theological things, more activist types. So moving to Spokane was weird. It was really hard for me to make friends so I spent a lot of time in the library. I'd check out books about music from the 1960s. My dad was really into Bob Dylan and the Who. But I got really into Jefferson Airplane, the Doors- then [Captain] Beefheart. And, whoa, let me tell you.

Some things started shifting around that point. But yeah, I also got into punk. The thing about the library is that they had all these records that you could check out. You could check out as many records as you could carry. There's no limit on how many you could check out. So I would ride my bike downtown and just fill up my backpack with like 20 pounds of records that I'm riding home with my bike. And they had a pretty incredible selection of world music from all over the place. They had all the like Smithsonian Folkways albums, they had all the- you know, that label that did all the like UNESCO recordings from.. like you name some country in Africa that most people have never heard of, they've got a whole vinyl album of all the different kinds of music from that one country in Africa. And they had a bunch of them, so I got to learn that music from this part of West Africa is different from this part of East Africa. And then, this region here has this kind of thing. Like, oh, there's this other instrument. What's this instrument? And there'd be like a little booklet inside the record and you could read all about that. Music from Indonesia, Korea, Japan. They had a lot of Native American albums. And every kind of obscure European folk music. So I learned that Yugoslavia also has their own kind of bagpipes.

And then this part of Italy also has another kind of bagpipe. And they're totally different than Scottish Highland bagpipes. They don't even sound the same. So, you read the notes in all these old records and It's like your passport to traveling the entire world in sound. Pretty, pretty amazing that I got into that kind of thing at that age. I mean,I didn't know a single person my age who gave a rat's ass about any of this kind of stuff- music from all these far flung corners. And I was also getting into the punk scene at the same time. So eventually I figured out if someone dressed in a bunch of ripped up clothes and maybe their hair's cut kind of funny, and they’ve got a tattoo or weird eyeliner or something- if they come up to you downtown and hand you a crumpled up handbill, you best be advised to take that handbill and read. It'd be like a time and a place and an address, and then a bunch of bands with real scary sounding names that you never heard of. But, I eventually got my dad convinced that it was okay for him to drive me to a place with a bunch of punks hanging out. He would actually drop me off. And I'd have four bucks in my pocket, I could pay the cover. And I'd see all these punk bands. There was a scene around this place, 123 Arts. That was where most of the punk shows were, but they pretty reliably would have something like every Friday or Saturday. There'd be some all ages show. So I got involved in that. Eventually, I got a four track and I was getting into playing guitar, but also trying to figure out what other kinds of sounds I could get with limited means. So I thought, well, gosh, you know. You need a lot of money to get a whole drum set, and I'm not a really good drummer or anything. I'm probably not going to get a drum set. But if you turn a garbage can upside down, and stick a microphone in the bottom, and you kind of adjust the bass, and tweak with the levels a little bit, get it the way you like- you can get these of crazy sounds. And, with the four track, you just lay something down and if you like how that sounds you do another track, like lay a baseline over it or whatever. So like I was putting out all my four track tapes, I guess I was about 14, 15, 16, 17. So I ended up making at least 10 albums worth of these cassette tapes. I'd just dub them off on a dual deck tape recorder and make a little photocopied cover, color them in by hand- because I was too cheap to pay for color copies. And I’d try to sell them to friends at school or just when I'd set up and do my busking. I'd sell tapes to strangers for five bucks. 

[00:11:59] 

Markly Morrison

What kind of material were you busking? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Well, what I played live would be different than what was on the tapes. I had some pretty provocative songs. Like, I had this song about a cat that crossed the road and got hit by a truck.

And it was like sort of graphic detail about- I mean it, you know it was shit that 14 year olds would be into. , I mean, like Uhhuh, it was like, oh, this kitty got hit by a car. And then I would start screaming. That would spark people's attention. 

Markly Morrison

What were you calling yourself at this time? 

Arrington de Dionyso 

I was just Arrington. Then it became this other thing because I started writing songs with my friend, Benjamin Bob. I'd been friends with him for a bit, but then he turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic and, you know, he had kind of a crisis and got his diagnosis and his family was pretty intense about forcing him to be very highly medicated. It was a mess, But he had this very imaginative approach to songwriting that we both shared. Like, we would write songs that would start with an idea from a fairy tale or sort of a cartoonish kind of motif, and then come up with music and we'd have some guest artists sometimes. That was called Ipso Foog. And we'd have guest artists come, and we'd have someone come do a guitar solo- cause, you know, the soloing part wasn't really my specialty. I just kind of laid down the more rhythmic stuff and I'd put flutes over it. I had started playing clarinet and getting into all that. Like kazoos and jaw harps and harmonicas and a bunch of banged out percussion on trash cans and just whatever, you know. Had a little keyboard, a guitar, bass, all that stuff. Ben had this really great song… [singing] “I have a cause for strife, my scarecrow came to life today. He threatened me with a knife, saying he demanded equal pay.” Oh wow, I can remember that. I haven't sung that since- I mean, you know, that's like 35 years ago or something! So anyway it was songs like that. It was kind of this fairy tale world, sort of exaggerated mythological figures and all that.

Markly Morrison

Did that band gig? 

Arrington de Dionyso

We did one gig. And it was kind of disastrous, but it was a very beautiful disaster. We had fun. And opened for a very popular punk band in Spokane, so we had the thrill of a much larger audience than we deserved. But around that time, I encountered the Go Team, and then later on a separate tour Beat Happening and Some Velvet Sidewalk on the same show together.

And those were like the shows that kind of completely changed my life because I learned about K Records. Because at that point, when The Go Team or Beat Happening went on tour, they had a whole stack of those yellow printed newsprint K catalogs- the ones that folded out into like this giant poster with every single release for distribution that they had in their mail order catalog. And obviously, this is before the internet. So when you get a mail order catalog, You kind of obsess over it. You read every single entry and you look at the names of the bands and there'd be like a little description- like these like very vague descriptions of dream… something like “music to chop logs to,” you know? I mean, what's that going to sound like? Or you read about all these artists that you have no way of ever even hearing them to know what they even sound like, unless you send in like five bucks and a couple of stamps or whatever for his tapes and records. I think records were like seven or eight bucks for an LP and four or five bucks for a cassette. And then eventually they got into CDs, but I don't think I really had any CDs till I moved out here. 

[00:17:22] 

Markly Morrison

Did you visit Olympia before you moved here? 

Arrington de Dionyso

So when it was time for me to get ready for college, I visited exactly one school, and that was the Evergreen State College. And, my dad had a friend whose son went here and they got a hold of him. He met up with us on the soccer field and walked us around campus and told us how much he loved going there. And I was just like, “All right, cool. Let's do it. Yeah, I'm going to go to school here. This is great.” So, it was the only school I applied to, only school I visited, and as luck would have it, it was the only school I got into. So, I moved out to Evergreen, and at first, I kind of had this idea that I was going to grow up to be a Spanish teacher. So I enrolled in this core program that was all Latin American studies, Latin American literature. I learned a lot about Argentina, kind of just everything having to do with Latin American culture and environment. We learned about rainforest and the Pampas and the Andes Mountains and you know, all that stuff.

But all this time where I was thinking like, “Oh, you know, studying Spanish, like I'm really good at that. So I should Figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up.” But anytime I was supposed to be working on a project, I'd be like, “Well, I do have homework, but I really want to lay down a track on these four track tapes that I'm working on. I've got enough songs together. If I just do like two more songs, I'll have enough to fill up a 60 minute cassette tape and I can release my new album.” And then I also started meeting people who had shows on Radio KAOS. And then I also took the class, Radio for Everyone, taught by my lifelong friend, Diana Arens, who was the program director at Radio KAOS- and also a recording engineer. So I started doing radio with my friend Fezdak Clamchopbreath. We had a radio show, but it wasn't just a radio show. So, see, I met Fezdak- Fezdak would set up his drum set outside of the recreation building. There's this walkway that's kind of like an echo chamber. Like, if you're walking by the window by the swimming pool, if you set up any loud instrument there, it reverberates throughout that entire sector of the campus.

Markly Morrison

It's like a little Canyon. Yeah. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah. So he would set up this set of timbales and just go on these marathon blasts, slamming the shit out of his timbales, and you could hear it all the way into the dorms. Because I was living in the dorms for fall quarter in 1992. So I'd be in my dorm, and I'd be like, “Whoa, man, someone's banging the hell out of some drums.” So I would grab my clarinet, and try to figure out who's playing, see if it was a jam session. It would just be him. He sounded like 20 drummers all at once. So, I kind of snuck up behind him and I started wailing on my clarinet. This was before I even had a bass clarinet, I was just playing a regular clarinet. And I was just like wailing on that and he was like, “Oh yeah, hell yeah.” So he'd be like banging the hell out of these drums. I'd be wailing on the clarinet. And so we were very, very fast friends. You know, we came from very different backgrounds, but we were talking a lot about how we really wanted to get on the radio and have our own radio show. And, you know, I had ideas of what that would be and he had completely different ideas of what that would be. So the mix that we kind of came up with was this very confrontational collage. We wanted the show to be a completely different show every single week. So sometimes there might be a unifying topic. But then we would just blast off topic completely. You know, I would be more doing the DJ stuff. Like I might be playing like two records, two CDs and a cassette tape all at the same time and like fading things in and out and playing things backwards. Or, getting samples of one thing and laying it over something else. And at the same time we would be taking in live phone calls, so people would just be kind of making noise at home, or we had people who would be like a character that would call in every week, even when it wasn't even on topic. We had this guy who'd pretend to be Mahatma Gandhi and it's like, “Okay, all right, Gandhi's on the phone again,” you know? It was just very noisy and inept, but also sometimes we'd stick a microphone outside the radio station and let it go all the way down to the ground and people could just like walk by and like yell something in the microphone and you know- I don't know, just all these kind of confrontational things. And we got kicked off the air after our very first show. Then we petitioned to be allowed back on the air and over the course of the next year and a half we had many altercations with management at Radio KAOS, many disagreements. But we were also very dutiful volunteers. We'd show up to all the staff meetings. So it's like, “Well, we can't kick these guys off. They volunteer for a lot of things too. But you know, it eventually got to a point where Fezdak got himself permanently banned from chaos. I got a non-negotiable suspension. Six months later, I could petition to be allowed back on the radio. When I got back on the radio, I completely changed the focus of my show and I wanted to do a show only playing homemade cassette tape music. Like, music that was 100 percent DIY music, that was not on a record label. Just bedroom tapes from all over the world. So There were a couple different tape trading magazines. The main ones were Fact Sheet 5 and then this other one called Gajoob, but there were a lot of them back then. Just these kind of one off magazines where anybody who sent in a tape was guaranteed to get a short review. They would listen to every single tape and write a description, they'd have your address, and it would say “Okay, this one's four dollars, send three stamps” and, you know, “This one comes with zine, it's six dollars,” you know, “This one, you gotta write to some guy in France, so you have to pay a little bit extra postage to get that guy to send you something.”

And then they would all say if they accept trades. So the idea would be if you send your own tape and then a couple of stamps, no matter what it was, they had to send something back to you. So this is like the pre-internet internet, completely analog. And I got into all these tape trading networks, and eventually you would even kind of strike up friendships where you'd collaborate with people. It's like, “Okay, you have like a cassette four track? Okay, cool I'll like lay down Some like rhythm and some like put some noises on it and then I'll send it to you and you can Solo over it or sing over it or like whatever and then send it back to me and mix it and put something out,” you know. So you get multi-layered collaborations with people, and all kinds of craziness would ensue.

Markly Morrison

Were you aware of Lost Music Network and OP magazine at that point? It seems like they definitely took a cue from that, with the brief review of anything that was submitted. 

Arrington de Dionyso

So isn't it amazing that being in Olympia and getting into all that stuff that I was into- I did eventually learn about OP because I was also kind of hanging around the K Records office, trying to get a job, working for a real record label. I was an intern for a bit, and then Calvin had a couple boxes in the back where it was just stacks of old issues of OP. Like, Whoa, like looking through those old back issues, that would kind of blow my mind. Cause that was like back when I was like five years old when these were being made. And so, yeah, I did learn that there was this legacy to my own musical interest that had precedent in Olympia. It just took a lot of digging and reading between the lines to get the full story, because with no determined narrative, you know, there wasn't anyone like telling the story for you. You’d get bits and pieces and sort of piece it together like, “Oh, so this was like a whole thing back in the day. Wow. How do people do that? How do people publish a thing like this? How do people build a network like that? And even how do you even set up a show,” you know? So, the cool thing about the KAOS radio library is at that point they still had all of those things that got reviewed in the OP magazines. Those were originally submissions sent to Radio KAOS from all these independent labels all over the country, and even internationally. In the experimental section of the record library, they still had all that stuff. You know, they had tons of records by this weird guy with blurry photos, Jandek. So like, “Okay, why are there like 20 records from Corwood Industries and they've all got blurry photos on the cover?” They were all in there. Records by Eugene Chadbourne, some of them looked like someone had drawn a cartoon by hand on the cover, you know- just like a paper bag cover and someone wrote something by hand and the song titles would be like glued on the back with a sticker or something. And Loren Mazzacane Connors like had a bunch of records, you know, and all this kind of crazy free jazz stuff, all these super weird noisy things. So I was getting into all this stuff and playing that on my radio show too. So eventually, two different things kind of happened at the same time. With those four track tapes I was telling you about, I had a couple of friends who played drums and also played bass and they were like, “Oh, Arrington, you know, your tapes are pretty cool. Have you ever thought about starting a band to play some of these songs?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, well, no, I hadn't ‘cause I can't play all these things all at the same time. But if I had someone else playing drums and bass, maybe I could figure it out.” I'd never had a real band before. So that was Old Time Relijun, and we had our first band practice on New Year's day, 1995. And we played our first show maybe like a week later, maybe two weeks later. And then we started playing as many shows as we could. But there weren't any other bands that sounded like what we were doing… 

Markly Morrison

…anywhere. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Well, yeah, no, but, but we, it was like, we had a hard time finding bands that would want to play a show with us because it just didn't fit with anything else. So we might have our friend Mirah open for us, just playing Mirah's beautiful songs. And then we would go on and it would be completely different, but we were all friends. Then we'd have our friend, Khaela [Maricich]- “Well, I have this, like, idea for a puppet show I want to do. So we're like, “Okay, cool, Khaela, do your puppet show, and then we'll have the band play after you.” So we would do all these kinds of things where the idea would be things that wouldn't necessarily fit together. It would just be like, “Hey, we're all friends and we want to do a show together.” But after putting on my own shows- either on campus, or there was this place downtown called the Midnight Sun that I did a lot of work with, and then there's this other place, Studio 321, that's not there anymore. Those were the main places. Because you had to rent out the place. It was like 50 bucks to rent it for the night. And if you're only charging people 4 bucks to get in, you can usually make your money back. 

Markly Morrison 

Right, you get 13 people in to cover the bases. Nobody gets paid…

Arrington de Dionyso

Right. Well, we wanted to get paid… It was like, if I get another 50 bucks on top of what- you know, like if we get a hundred bucks in and then I got the 50 bucks for the rent, like, whoa. I split that up with the band. I got like 15 or 20 bucks or whatever. I was always trying to figure out how I could do this and get paid, which was incredibly difficult because it would never be more than 50 bucks, you know. It was kind of like the same 50 bucks were shuffling back and forth to everybody in town, you know. But I came up with this notion, the Olympia Strange Music Society. And so the Olympia Strange Music Society- the idea would be, it wasn't like even like a real organization, it'd just be like any show that was going to be something that wasn't your run of the mill normal punk rock, or a show that had like a variety of different things. It might be somebody who's in another band, but it's going to be their side project. You know, maybe some dude from a real popular band, but it's like, “Oh, I want to do my thing where I just play tape loops for a while.” Like, okay, cool. So like we'll put that on the bill and then this other thing. So that would be the Olympia Strange Music Society. And I would say our first successful show where we had like more than 15 people show up- we actually had like 40 or 50 people show up- was when we brought Harvey Sid Fisher, the astrology singer, to do a set.

Markly Morrison

Astrology singer? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah, look this guy up. Harvey Sid Fisher. He is definitely not experimental at all. He was like this novelty lounge act. Just this dude singing, he had a song for every sign of the zodiac. It was really goofy. But the backup band that was organizing the whole tour with him was all these kind of weirdo noise musicians from Vancouver, Canada. And each of the people in his backup band, they all had their own bands. That was how I met Nardwuar. The people in the background band were also in this band, the Goblins, which was Nardwuar and a couple other dudes. So they played and that was super weird. Then there was some kind of noisier feedback thing. And the Irving Klaw Trio played, Old Time Religion played. So it was a lot going on in one night and it was a successful show, everybody got paid a little bit and it was sort of the coming out party for the Olympia Strange Music Society.  


Markly Morrison 

Was this at the Midnight Sun?

Arrington de Dionyso

This was at the Midnight Sun, it would have been 1995. I probably have the poster somewhere I could dig up for you. That was good times… so I did about five or six shows with the Olympia Strange Music Society. And then this guy Jim McAdams, who also had a show on KAOS called “What's This Called?” under a pseudonymous DJ name, Ricardo Lovewang. He eventually kind of hit me up and was like, “Hey, like, I see you doing this thing with Olympia Strange Music Society. That's a pretty cool idea. Have you ever thought about doing a festival?” And I was like, “Well, golly, I don't know the first thing about putting together a festival, but what do you have in mind? Let's try to figure it out.” So, he, unlike me, was active on this brand new thing called the World Wide Web. I never touched the stuff, but he knew how to go into these, like- I don't know what they were. Like message boards where people talked about experimental music. And some of the people on these groups would even talk about, “Hey, we're an upright bass, bassoon, and farfisa combo from San Francisco, and we're gonna drive up the West Coast. Does anyone know cool places to play?” So like, okay, whoa, that's a way to get a hold of people. I never thought of that. So Jim was pretty instrumental in building contacts with all these different groups. And a lot of them were coming up to play at the Seattle Improvised Music Festival. He scheduled the Olympia Experimental Music Festival to be a few days before the Improvised Music Festival, so we had like half a dozen acts of groups that were going up to play at this thing in Seattle. He got a couple people from Seattle to come down and play, and then we filled in like whatever extra spots we had with like a couple of different local people, all quote unquote, like “experimental” noise, free jazz, or the more kind of encompassing term of outsider music. We didn't really have a way of defining what it was that we were doing. It was just anything that kind of falls through the cracks and kind of makes you scratch your head. If you don't know how to define it, that's even better, you know? Like, we had a guy bring a bunch of like pieces of styrofoam and he had like a cello bow and he would bow styrofoam and get all these crazy, scratchy sounds of bowed styrofoam. And it sounded like a crazy idea. Watching it was completely crazy. But it was actually incredibly musical. And like, if you closed your eyes and listened to it, you'd never guess it was just styrofoam. I mean, it sounded like he was like bowing wine glasses or something, you know? It was actually very beautiful. So stuff like that. Some of it would be more composed, some of it would be completely improvised. Some of it would have kind of a theatrical element. Or there might be a dancer and a bunch of people making noise. Some of it would be completely free form. People making noise on electric violins and somebody like painting a canvas on the back, or something would have projections of scratchy handmade animation on a eight millimeter reel to reel, you know? Like, anything goes craziness.

[00:38:39]

Markly Morrison

What was the admission for that? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Well, this was a festival. So I think we had to charge $8 for a festival pass. 

Markly Morrison

Wow. That's like double the cost of a normal show. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah, the first couple of years were pretty ragtag. We had a run of a few years where each year we'd get a little bit fancier. We'd like start printing out a program guide, I'd go around to local businesses and ask for $25 for an ad at the program guide. You know, I mean, it's peanuts to even think about like the amount of money we're talking about, but I’d go to local restaurants and they’d give me $25 and I’d give them a little ad in the program guide. It would have a list of all the people playing, and it eventually became a multi venue festival where we'd have like one or two nights at Midnight Sun, have something at Arrowspace. And then if we had a bigger act coming through, we would rent out the backstage at the Capitol Theater. So like one year we had Saccharin Trust play, the old SST [record label] band from San Pedro or something came up and played. And Negativland played at least once. And you know, Mark Hosler kind of had different side projects that would play every couple of years or whatever.

Markly Morrison

He was living here at the time. 

Arrington de Dionyso 

Yeah. He was living here at the time. You know, people that were headliners in our eyes, but you know, it's hard to come up with anyone that anyone nowadays would have heard of, you know. It's pretty niche, obscure kind of stuff. I started building more bridges with the free jazz scene. So around 2000-ish, I kind of started becoming friends with Bert Wilson and some of the people that he introduced me to, so I was getting deeper and deeper into the free improvisation scene, but also the free jazz scene. Like, they're not exactly the same thing, right? So the free jazz scene, hanging out with Bert, getting some saxophone lessons from him, and then also hearing all his crazy stories of all the crazy stuff he had done and people he'd played with. And sometimes he would have someone coming through town that he would refer to us. We might combine forces. And then I found out about this guy, Jeffrey Morgan, who- similar to this thing with the OP that we were talking about earlier, this guy, Jeffrey Morgan- I found out he had been doing all the same things that I was kind of doing, but like a whole generation before me. So back in like 1981, he was putting together free improvisation sessions with like 20 people all playing at the same time, and dancers and musicians and painters, just doing these crazy happenings in some random room at the Evergreen State College, or restaurants that let jazz bands play and stuff downtown at the time. So I would connect with people like him and then have them on bills, ‘cause I liked it being multi generational, you know? But then we'd also have people who had never performed before in their lives, like “Well, I've got this concept, I want to wrap myself up in duct tape and tear the tape off with a microphone.” And if anyone came with a proposal like that to me, I would just say yes. Like, “Okay, yeah, let's do that. Let's put you on this show opening for this guy from LA” or whatever. 

Markly Morrison

Cool, like bridging local communities. And community from beyond as well. 

Arrington de Dionyso

So the cool thing about that is, you’ve got someone coming up from San Francisco or LA or Portland or whatever. And you put them on a bill, you booked a show and it's a cool show. And people come out and maybe they get 50 bucks or maybe they don't, you know, whatever. I was always bringing people back to my house. I had a lot of couches and stuff. I was living out on the East side, kind of by the freeway, at this house that had a lot of trees around it. So I’d have all these weirdo musicians coming and crashing with me after the show and hang out all night listening to records and just hanging out and having a good time. Well, guess what? If I got to the point where my band wanted to play a show in Portland, or Seattle, or San Francisco, or LA or whatever- I had all these people that I had booked a show for, and let them stay at my place, and drink beer together, and hang out, listen to music together. So I had all their phone numbers and contacts and everything. So when I started booking my first tours I had people to hit up and be like, “Hey, could you help us get a show in such and such,” whatever. And that was how I booked my first tour. 

Markly Morrison

Wow. So the Experimental Music Festival helped you take your slice of Olympia to other parts of the country. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Exactly. Yeah.

Markly Morrison

And eventually, the world. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Global domination. 

[00:44:39] 

Markly Morrison

So Old Time Relijun played at these festivals for the first few years, at least?

 

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah. 

Markly Morrison

Were there other rock bands on the bill, or something resembling a rock band? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Well, yeah- Irving Klaw Trio was kind of the one group that probably had slightly similar but slightly different influences to Old Time Relijun, but like, it was similar enough and different enough. We both got into kind of real ragged guitar tones and they were a bit looser. They're kind of in between punk and jazz and kind of this mix of things. I don't know, like, I guess maybe deconstructed rock music, you know- rock music where it's like, you can tell it's a rock song, but it's kind of falling apart in the middle, you know? Like US Maple kind of stuff. We probably played four or five shows together, you know.

Markly Morrison

Where were they based?

Arrington de Dionyso

They were an Olympia band. They were in Olympia, and then they got a little bit more popular and moved to Portland and they toured around a bit. They put out a few records. There was this other band, it was all kids who grew up in Yakima and they all moved out to go to Evergreen at the same time. They were originally called the Good Time Spasm Band, and then they changed their name to Gangula Stretch. And they were kind of a similar thing- like, really weird, radical, deconstructed. Some of the songs would have like kind of a funky part, then it would like completely fall apart, then there'd be this like noisy section, there'd be like some parts of it you could kind of dance to, some parts that were like totally freeform, you know? They'd play mostly rock instruments, but then they'd have a couple songs where they'd pull out clarinets and just tweak out on clarinets for a bit. So it was like, you had Old Time Relijun, Irving Klaw Trio, Gangula Stretch- we finally found people that it would make sense for us to have a bill together, even though none of it sounded similar, but it kind of would fit together. Eventually, with Old Time Relijun, we started making a little bit more inroads with the K Records scene, and we would sometimes play a bill opening for Dub Narcotic Sound System. And then I remember we played- there were a couple of shows we got to open for one of my heroes, Jad Fair from Half Japanese. As it turns out, that first Half Japanese album- the triple LP set, We Are Not Men, We Are Beasts- was very influential to me in wanting to start Old Time Relijun, because I wanted it to be a rock band that embraced the chaos of more free form improvisatory elements. Like, I envisioned it being the kind of band where you had like these sketches of songs, but that the entire set would just be improvised. We never actually did that, but we would go up without a set list at all. We would be playing a song and then the bass player would throw in one measure of the bass line from a different song and we would all look at each other like, “Okay, cool.” And then we would know we'll play that one next, you know. And the drummer would be really on top of it and then we’d like all look at each other, without even a cue or anything, we’d all go into the other song. So we would do things like that, but it never reached that idea of total free form rock, you know, like free rock as opposed to free jazz, like some combination therein.

[00:49:10] 

Markly Morrison

I'd like to talk about Old Time Relijun a little bit more. So who was in the initial trio? 

Arrington de Dionyso

The initial trio was Bryce Panic on drums and Aaron Hartman on the upright bass. After we played four or five shows, we also added Fezdak Clamchopbreath on his incredibly noisy timbales, and that kind of changed the band. We became a bit of a dance party band for a bit because the timbales and the drums together, you know-

Markly Morrison: It's a recipe for boogie.

 

Arrington de Dionyso

It's a recipe for boogie. Yeah, we got people going. It got pretty wild. We got people dancing. But Fezdak had a way of making sure that his timbales were louder than every other instrument. So after having him in the band for maybe about a year, we asked him to leave the band. And it was kind of a messy breakup. We were all sad for a while. But the band kind of shifted focus, our direction and our sound got a little bit more distilled. And then we were eventually ready to record our first album with Diana Arens, our good old friend who was the KAOS program director back when I first started doing radio. Diana Arens engineered our first album in the Dub Narcotic Studio back when it wasn't even a studio- it was actually the basement in Calvin's house. So we got all our instruments crammed into a little room and we played every song live to two track. No overdubs, no effects. We wanted it to sound exactly like how we sounded when we play live. 

Markly Morrison

Is that the Songbook? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Songbook Volume One, yeah. Which- we never even sent it out to labels because I wanted to start my own label, Pinecone Alley. And so I borrowed $1,000 from my friend who had an inheritance. I mean, I kind of like finagled it in a way. I was like, “Oh, I really just need $1,000, you know?” So I got $1,000 to get the CDs manufactured from one of those cheap places on the back of a magazine. Because, you know, manufacturing CDs actually used to be more expensive than it is now, so it was a big deal. They just sent me the spindle with all the CDs and then we made the covers. I had a secret key that worked at the photocopy machines at Evergreen. It was like a staff card that I don't know where I got it, but I had it. So I printed up a thousand copies that was then folded, kind of like a little origami thing. Then I found a whole box of these popcorn bags. So you could put the CD in the popcorn bag, fold it around, get the cover, you know- fold it in this way, fold it in that way, and then it was a CD cover. And then I had paperclips and I would paperclip it shut. So that was Songbook Volume One, recorded in 1996. When it came out, it was ‘97. I sent promo copies out. Like, maybe I sent, like a hundred copies out to magazines and zines and stuff, radio stations… You know, ‘cause I had all the mailing lists from K records. They were always generous and sharing. It's like, “Oh yeah, here's the record stores we deal with. Here's some writers you can send it to. Here's radio stations that play stuff.” And then they were helping with the distribution. So, miraculously, between the shows, the distro, and the promotion I was doing, we actually made our money back. It took a couple years, but, like, we sold out of the thousand CDs that we had made. Which, like, nowadays, that's almost impossible for like a total hundred percent DIY project to sell a thousand copies. It's crazy. It's like, that's not even possible. But, you know, we played enough shows and networked enough that it happened. And then for the next album, Bryce left the band because he wanted to go study yoga in India. He decided, “You know, I don't really feel like I'm a drummer. I'm more of a dancer. I'm going to go study yoga.” I'm like, okay. So Bryce was out of the band, and eventually we got this kid from Anacortes to move down to Olympia and start playing with us. This guy named Phil Elverum. And then, his approach to playing drums was completely different than Bryce. He didn't really have the jazzy background at all. He was just more punk, but like very self-taught punk. So we ended up creating songs together that had a very different vibe, but I was into it. It was the level of rugged that maybe it should have been all along, like it was more kind of gnarly.

Markly Morrison 

To me, it sounds like maybe he's thinking about each piece of the drum kit as its own separate entity rather than “this is a thing I'm playing.”

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I mean, we would kind of create some beats together, we had a couple songs where- drum and bass [electronic dance music] was kind of popular around then. And there was this drum and bass night that I would go to every Tuesday at Thekla, which is like a big club where DJ Kento [Oiwa] was spinning… he'd go to Tokyo and get all these crazy drum and bass records that no one could get here, so he'd be playing that kind of stuff.

And there were like certain songs that I would hear him play, I was like- that's all like electronic or whatever, but you could kind of do something similar with a rock band where the bass line can be kind of slower, but then the drum part can be like really like thrashed out, you know? So I'd kind of get Phil to like try to- it's like “Hey, you hear that rhythm? Let's try to play something kind of like that. We'll do that, but then make it our own style and then I'll write really crazy passionate lyrics over it and we'll turn it into this other thing.” So we had some songs like that, and a lot of songs that would kind of build up real heavy and then completely fall apart, then go into this other thing. And yeah, it was great. Then he was also really adept at figuring out all this weird vintage gear that Calvin had at the second Dub Narcotic studio, which was in the big room at the K Records building. So we got all this free studio time, kind of going in there after hours and messing around with the 8 track. And eventually, when we had enough stuff together for an album, we played it for Calvin and he was into it. He was like, “Yeah, alright. Let's put this out.” So first Old Time Relijun came out on Pine Cone Alley in the popcorn bags. Second album, Uterus and Fire, we got like an actual legit release on CD and record. 

Markly Morrison

You didn't have to paperclip it.

Arrington de Dionyso

No. But We did screen print every LP cover. It was just a black and white drawing, but then I colored in the lips on the front in red on every single record. 

Markly Morrison

Oh, wow.  So if you got one of those, it's an original.

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah, yeah, those are hard to find. 

Markly Morrison

So, you say Phil moved down from Anacortes, was he already doing the Microphones at that point? 

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah, yeah, but the Microphones was kind of his four track project that he started. Phil’s a couple of years younger than me- two or three years younger. So I think we got into four track recording at relatively the same age, you know, like when I was like 14 or 15. He was probably like 14 or 15 or so, you know. So similar thing, he made all these tapes… maybe he'd make like 20 copies and sell them to friends or whatever. He was doing a little mail order kind of thing. And the mail order label thing was not a super popular thing to do, but there were definitely, people doing that, you know? It was kind of a thing, like “Oh yeah, I have a mail order tape label.” He also had a few releases that were him recording friends, and that would be a different project. He might even be playing on it or producing it or whatever, all these different identities.  And that's how we met Karl Blau, ‘cause you know, Karl had his own thing. But then he and Phil also played with Brett Lunsford, the old Beat Happening guitarist. That was a band called D+, and they did a few pretty big US tours around that era. So even before Phil joined Old Time Relijun, he had a decent amount of touring experience. That was pretty helpful because I still didn't know how to drive, but Phil did. So for our first three tours together, Phil was driving. And then Aaron bought a van for another tour that we did, then Aaron was driving the van. I eventually got a driver's license, sometime after that.

Markly Morrison

Lyrically speaking, especially in the earlier stuff, there's a lot of religious imagery, things like that. And I'm wondering how much of that is related to your upbringing- a son of a Methodist minister, and whether you subscribed to any of that at any point in your life, or had a breaking off point.

Not a lot of bands at that time were really putting that kind of imagery into their lyrics. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah. Well, we had a lot of songs with like fire, lots of songs about fire and water and floods and things like that. 

Markly Morrison

Or even down to the band name itself.

Arrington de Dionyso

Yeah. The band name itself, Old Time Relijun. I mean, yeah, all that's there. I think I had a period of time- when I was like maybe 14 or 15- I kind of started calling myself a pagan. And I was reading a lot about mythology and I had a couple of books on like Wicca and stuff, but I don't know. The witchcraft thing didn't- like, once I met people who were like actual Wicca people, I didn't really like click with those people as a culture. But I had a lot of books about 

Native American myths and legends, and books about shamanism in Siberia and books about voodoo and things like that. I mean, I would read about all of that stuff. 

Markly Morrison

You're drawn to mysticism. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Mysticism, yeah. It didn't have to be an outright rejection of my church upbringing. But the thing about it was, when I got into this idea of the cult of Dionysus- but Dionysus not necessarily as a personality as much as like an archetypal force… So I can actually explain it pretty simply in this way, that the cult of Dionysus moves across time and place. And it can be within the garment of any one particular religion, like the religion itself wasn't important. What's important is that Dionysus is the energetic force that allows one to experience divinity as a physical presence in one's literal body. So that can include trance and possession and the magic of that kind of energy. Becoming like a vessel, becoming a channel for this powerful, transcendent force.

And so in my studies of all that world music and stuff that I was getting into, every now and then you'd find a record, it'd be like ”Trance possession rituals of such and such place.” And you'd listen to that and be like, “Whoa,” you can hear, people are really freaking out, like there's a spirit moving through them, you know? And then I would check out videos too. And sometimes you could see videos- even in American music from gospel singers to blues singers, to the original, really early rock and roll singers. You watch old footage of some of that stuff and you're like, Oh my God, that that's not just a person getting up there, sharing a song. They’re completely giving the totality of their self over entirely to the spirit that's driving this music forward, and just the recognition of that- that it's something that happens across all cultures. Any time and place, it doesn't matter. It's that phenomena in and of itself of, of being completely possessed by the force that's powering that music. That was what I wanted to represent and encapsulate in the music of Old Time Relijun. I think in our live concerts, especially- after we kind of figured out what we were doing in the logistic sense of having a band- I think we definitely were able to get to that kind of transcendent place as a band in our live shows. And then in our recordings, I think we were successful to varying degrees. I mean, the process of recording is pretty different, but I wanted those recordings to capture the essence of that spirit, whatever you call it. So the idea, the Old Time Relijun thing- it wasn't trying to be like a manic street preachers kind of thing at all. That wasn't what we were going for. It wasn't meant to be a fire and brimstone Preacher thing. It was to tap into this idea of like Spiritual force as a physical embodiment through sound, you know? That was the essence of what we're going for. It wasn't any one particular religion being referenced, but kind of pulling into lots of different things like mysticism and esoteric studies or whatever, but putting it all in a package you could dance to.

[01:06:35] 

Markly Morrison

Let me get back to the experimental music festival. Eventually you ceded curation over to someone named Eric Duckhugger. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Now Aelva Duckhugger [Aelva McIntosh]. Yeah, Duckhugger took over curation for a couple years, I think. 

Markly Morrison

My digging around said 2001.

Arrington de Dionyso

Sounds about right.

Markly Morrison

But I guess what I'm wondering about is, leading up to the turn of the century, how hospitable was Olympia- the city, the community? How receptive and how willing [were they] to see to it that you made these things happen. What were the hurdles? 

Arrington de Dionyso

I think that the aim of the Experimental Music Festival was to let people know that it was okay to be a total freak. I wanted there to be some sense of unity and community in anybody making “weirdo music.” Regardless of how you define it, there should be some solidarity with that. But the essence of being in the weirdo music scene is that anything you get into, you're kind of getting into these really niche territories of music that most people don't even really consider to be music. It's fairly abstract stuff or it's confrontational performance art. The idea of a musical performance being something that will completely reshape how you even define the concept of music. So, how was it received? I mean, we would have a band like Noggin come, which was this elder of the noise scene, Michael Griffen playing an electric violin with like six amplifiers behind him, and Eric Ostrowski on electric guitar. And they would just do this like 20-minute blast of the most frenetic, insane, over amplified noise you could imagine. And you'd look up and it's just these two guys just making all this sound, sawing away on violins and whatever. And it would just be completely insane stuff. So there's definitely an audience that got into that. We were all about building bridges because somebody who's into like the hardcore punk kind of thing, if you're attuned to really loud, kind of abrasive sounds anyway, why not go a little further into like freer ideas of noise that aren't so… like the hardcore punk stuff, I always respect the energy people do bring to it, but musically a lot of it really would end up sounding exactly the same. I know people will say that about noise or whatever, but the types of groups that we were having play at these festivals- nothing sounded similar to any other thing. Everything had a really unique identity to it to the degree that it's difficult to even define or talk about what it even is, you know? So I felt like I had this role as a charismatic torchbearer. I just wanted to like evangelize, like “Hey, like step out of your box a little bit. And like, imagine what if, what if music were like this, but also this? This is something that would appeal to you, too,” you know? And so like I would be that annoying guy walking through The Voyeur when it was packed with people eating and drinking beer, handing out a handbill to every person, making contact and like looking in them in the eyes like “Hey, I've got a group from Japan flying out for this festival. I know you're really gonna like it if you hear it. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of them, they're gonna be good, come to this show.” Again, and again, and again, I never learned my lesson because the people that I gave the handbills to that said “Oh yeah, yeah, cool. That sounds great. Yeah. Okay. I'll be there.” Those people never showed up, but somebody showed up. People would show up. It was never the people that I thought were going to come. It'd be different people. Maybe they maybe they didn't even hear about it from me, they heard about it somewhere else. I could never figure out what is the thing that actually gets people to come. I mean, do you need to put “free cookies and doughnuts” or something? Like, then maybe someone will be there. But yeah, I was that guy. I would probably annoy the hell out of people. Every time you saw me I'd be telling you about some things like, “Oh, this is on Thursday. It's going to be great.” I don't know. I think the experimental music festival definitely became a thing that everybody in the scene knew existed, but none of those people would ever actually show up to something unless maybe one of their friends was on the bill. And we would do things where- like I said earlier- someone who's the guitarist in the really popular punk band, but this is their side project where they do tape loops and run it through a feedback thing and an analog synth thing that they built from a kit, you know? Sometimes those guys would, they would actually bring a big audience to tip the scales a little bit. But it was always really frustrating, people would show up like, “Hey, what time is Mike going to be on? I want to see Mike's new noise thing.” I'm like, “Well, okay. There's a bill with four different things, Mike’ll be third.” “Okay, cool. I'm going to go get a drink and come back.” You know? Like, what? They wouldn't have any curiosity or interest in seeing any of the other acts. They just want to see what Mike's doing. And then they leave and go get drinks with Mike. So Duckhugger did a couple of years of the festival, then they let me know that they were feeling a little burnt out. They didn't really want to do it all themselves for the next year. And I got to a thing where like, “Okay, I'll take over again for a bit.” But I did like another three or four years, and eventually I implemented a policy that I wasn't going to book you on the festival to perform unless you agreed that you were going to be there for every show. Sometimes it would be like a four night festival or a five night festival. I demanded that people stay in town for the entire duration of the festival and go to every show. And when I did that, it may not have been any bigger of an audience, but the camaraderie and the participation of the people involved was exponentially a completely different thing. I mean, there have been babies born due to the meetings that occurred in those years of the festival. That's saying a lot. You know, there have been people who are still married and making music together because of that festival happening in that way. At that time we were doing it in the summer. So I'd be like, during the daytime, “Hey, let's all go to the river all together…” All these like experimental musicians from all over the world just hanging out at the river. It's like, “Okay, we got to go back downtown. It's almost time for the show to start. And then we'd have the shows that would go on- some of them would go pretty late, like till two in the morning. So, there was like a real group essence that was built and kind of became a team. That was pretty cool. for me, that was like the experimental music festival at its best. 

[01:16:19]

Markly Morrison

What recommendations would you give if, say, somebody's going to revive the Olympia Experimental Music Festival?

Arrington de Dionyso

I think there's a lot more people doing some things that are in the realm of experimental. I mean, like there's a lot more people doing DIY electronic stuff than ever before. But it's a lot of solo acts. So my advice, if you're going to book a festival, you absolutely need to make sure that it's not an entire night of like eight different solo acts. You gotta get ensembles. It's got to be a mix. You've also got to be really careful with the amount of gear people are bringing and when they tell you that they're gonna be able to set up and break down in 10 minutes, look at what they're bringing and don't believe them. It's gonna take longer than 10 minutes to set up if they've got like eight people who all need to plug things in and they all gotta put their little pedal boards out and all that. It's gonna take a while to get that stuff plugged in and tested. If you can get a venue where there's two different stages, that can be helpful. If people have to wait a half hour for an act to switch over, they're gonna leave and go get drinks at the bar down the street. You know, if you have a whole festival and you've got someone who's like a big name, like they're the more popular person that people have heard of, you got to be really careful where you put them on the bill because you'll get that thing where people who will show up and they just want to see that person and they're going to leave as soon as they're done. You gotta employ social engineering to make sure that doesn't happen. Like, maybe have that person do their solo set of what they normally do, but then also have them play in an ensemble with people they never played with before, find a way to mix it up somehow. If they're like a big name in the improv scene or whatever, you could have them play a couple of different times in different groupings of people. Do something that'll make it interesting. Have them play in a situation that's doing something that they're not normally known for. Gender balance- don't do a show that's just all dudes. Mix it up. And then at the same time, don't tokenize people on gender stuff. You don't want to have someone up there doing like total crap just because they're female or representative of some other minority or whatever. But do your curatorial due diligence. Like, tap into different communities to bring different identities to the forefront and see what people are doing, you know? I don't want to go to a festival where every single act is people on laptops. Have acts that are all acoustic instruments, have acts where it's instruments and electronics, have acts that are electronics, have acts that are more about like dance with some sound element involved, have someone doing like a weird puppet show thing or projecting the movie and they're doing something in front of the screen, you know. Just mix it up. Be willing to take risks on people's more off the wall proposals. Some of the most memorable things at the festival were, someone would be like, “Oh, I have this thing I want to do for the experimental music festival.” They might not be a person in the scene, they just had this idea that they want to do. Allow for that to happen. You don't need every single act to be like a big headlining name. I always thought every year in the festival there's gotta be at least one performance where someone is getting up and performing for the first time in their life. And they're just as deserving of the same respect from the audience as, like a 50 year veteran saxophonist or whatever who can go all up and down their instrument. Like, someone who's just picking something up and making sound with it. They're just as deserving of respect. Don't have them playing when no one's going to show up anyway, have them sandwiched in between things where they're going to receive some audience support and have them on equal footing as your veteran performers.

Markly Morrison

Speaking as someone who's been in the Olympia music community for over 30 years and has traveled all around the world, what keeps you staying here when you come back home? What have you learned? What has the Olympia community taught you?

Arrington de Dionyso

I do ask myself that from time to time. There is still a kind of sense of solidarity with people who are doing their thing. Olympia has been of great benefit to me as a launching pad where, through Olympia, I've had access to other communities in New York, LA, the Bay Area, Seattle, Portland, somewhat in the Midwest, Europe, Japan. Olympia is a place that- people from those places have wanted to come to Olympia to figure out what's going on here. In all of those meetings, I've always been able to build contacts and then actually go to those places myself. Australia, New Zealand, I mean, you know, all over. So, Olympia is part of that sort of historic lineage of networks that expand out in surprising ways. Olympia is a good place to build various forms of resistance against the status quo, whether that's corporate music and all the Spotify controlled kind of garbage. People cultivating unique expressions and forms that subvert the dominant paradigms. You know, I think Olympia's always gonna have some fertile ground for that to happen. I have a spiritual connection to the land here- the land and the water and the sky and the mountains. I mean, Olympia is this place where all those things kind of meet together on fertile ground. And that manifests in the creative work that people do here, too.

 

Markly Morrison

Is there anything else you'd like to address on the record, before we wrap it up? 

Arrington de Dionyso 

There's just so many people who have come and gone, people who kind of come through town for a couple of years, three or four years, five years, six years- people really make their mark and then they gotta move along to some other spot. So that kind of constant re-pollination of people bringing things from wherever it is they came from. And then, hopefully… wherever they end up going, they're bringing some of that Olympia pollen along with them. Often when I'm on tour playing in remote corners of wherever it is, I'll run into people who are like, “Oh man, Yeah, I saw you do this thing at the Midnight Sun in 1998, man, that was crazy, man! That made me want to go start a band!” You'll hear that, and that's pretty cool. You know, like- we're all over the place. So yeah, I don't know what the point of that is, but, I think about that. 

Markly Morrison

In living here for almost 20 years, I've definitely seen just a lot of influx. People come here, they make an impact, off to the next impact they're going to make wherever else they're going to go. I’d like to say after knowing you for almost two decades, I learned a hell of a lot about you today. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Oh shit…

Markly Morrison

Thank you so much for doing this. 

Arrington de Dionyso

Thank you, Markly.

Mentioned in this interview:

Benjamin Bobb

Spokane, WA musician. Childhood friend and bandmate of Arrington de Dionyso of Old Time Relijun

Diana Arens

Audio engineer and promoter

Fezdak Clamchopbreath

Pseudonym of a KAOS DJ, mid 1990s

Jim McAdams

KAOS DJ, aka Ricardo Wang

Mark Hosler

Founding member of Negativland, lived in Olympia 1990-2003

Bert Wilson

Local jazz saxophonist, moved to Olympia in the late 1970s

Calvin Johnson

Founder of K Records, musician, organizer of International Pop Underground Convention

Aaron Hartman

Olympia upright bassist

Kento Oiwa

Olympia musician

Karl Blau

Anacortes, WA songwriting singer (active 1990-present)

Bret Lunsford

Anacortes musician, lived in Olympia in the 1980s. Musician, co-founder of GESCCO

Michael Griffen

Olympia violinist

Aelva McIntosh

Olympia concert promoter and performance artist, fka "Duckhugger"

Nardwuar

Vancouver, BC freelance journalist and musician

Jeffrey Morgan

Olympia jazz/experimental musician, early 1980s