Aarni

Aarni

Year Formed: 1998

Active: Still Playing

Genre: Doom Traditional

Label: None



Bathos Tohcoth Duumipeikon paluu Omnimantia EP split

Description:

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 there. In the grove 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 grove's vicinity. At night strange apparitions were seen there."

- Kristfrid Ganander, Mythologia Fennica (1789 e.v.)
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 Hebrew 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 avantbarde', 'progressive doom metal', 'Yanni with distorted guitars', 'primitive black metal', 'underground progressive rock', 'repulsonic metametal', 'shit', 'melanchthonic dumb metal', 'savantgawd submusic', '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', 'Shroom Gumbo', 'Functional Music' and 'Dream Torrent Music'. Confused? Join 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. Aarni aims for comfortably unpolished results using a mixture of bad and good playing. Probably the band functions as much-needed therapy to its members: Aarni's output could be described as a charming 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 include: Balancing thy ancestral path with the positive sides of modern technology & cultural redesign; magick, occultism, esoteria and world mythologies, brain-change, Discordianism, collective & personal liberation, traditionalism and theories of analytical psychology (especially those of C.G. Jung); the Cthulhu mythos as described by H.P. Lovecraft and fellow authors; plus divers more obscure topics.

Aarni's superintelligent lyrics take form in the language believed most suitable for the song's subject: usually in English, Finnish or Classical Latin and occasionally in French, Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian, Enochian, Old Norse, German, Spanish, Swedish, Glossolalic, Ouranian-Barbaric &c.

Aarni has apparently always existed, but the current incarnation's story began in the autumn of 1998 e.v. when M.·.M.·. suddenly began solitarily developing his vague musical ideas further. He got telepathetic messages from the unicorn dolphin elder of Sirius B, who begged M.·.M.·. to reawaken the ancient Xothian aural technology tradition called aarni. Soon after choosing to comply with the demands of these psychotic transmissions, 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 Mahatma 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.

Auditory releases so far: different demos in 2001 and 2002 e.v., split CD with Umbra Nihil (2002 e.v.), debut full length CD Bathos (2004 e.v.), second full length CD Tohcoth in February 2008 e.v. and EP CDR Omnimantia (2009 e.v.), split CD with Persistence in Mourning in April 2012 e.v. Also appearances on various compilation, project and tribute albums, such as Entering The Levitation: a Tribute to Skepticism (2007 e.v.), Rising of Yog-Sothoth: Tribute to Thergothon (2009 e.v.) and Yogsothery - Gate I: Chaosmogonic Rituals Of Fear (2010 e.v.). Third full length album Lovecraftian hopefully out in 2023 e.v.

Aarni currently resides on a primitive planet named 'Earth' by some of its past primate inhabitants.