MySpace a place for friends

Subscribe | View All

»Out in Your Scenery A few weeks back we posted an mp3 of...

»Fireflies or Lightning Bugs We have just posted a new mp3 of MFS...

»Nurse or Nuke We've been working on some new songs in an...

Aridne is the latest musical incarnation of lifelong friends and bandmates that have shared the stage with many of today's regional and national jambands, including The Big Wu, The Slip and The Disco Biscuits. The current lineup is a tight, technical quartet equally comfortable tackling an open improvisation or an instrumental constructed from 'large piles of numbers'.

Guitarist Paul Desman and brothers Matt and Adam Robusto (guitar and drums, respectively) readily define themselves as obsessive control freaks. After several years of playing in the Pittsburgh area in the jamband Stone, the group parted ways and the trio decided to redefine themselves and document their music. They shared the responsibility for writing and performing guitar and bass parts, overdubs, and horn and string arrangements. Old friend Andrew MacDonald, a singer and former cellist, soon joined the band on bass and quickly got up to speed in the new quartet.

It became clear during the initial songwriting process that the music being made was unique and tempermental, and when it came time to record their debut album the band knew they had to take the entire process under their own control. They built a studio, acquired digital recording equipment, and developed a sound that avoids the excesses of modern production. The result is a loosely conceptual collection of songs produced in a clean, detailed manner: the perfect balance of simplicity and complexity.

The band members have diverse sonic tastes (just check out their personal Myspace pages) but their ideas converge into a music that is harmonically dense, carefully colored, and heavily rhythmic. Songs are woven together from intertwining vocal and instrumental melody lines, framed by rhythms that accentuate rather than duplicate the music. Aridne's songs could best be described as scale-invariant: two-minute songs often have as many pieces as ten-minute ones.

The twelve songs on Aridne's debut album, perpetual retrospective perspective, are meditations on time, identity, the mythology of childhood, haunting and absurd dreamscapes, and the loss that accompanies friendship. Prp is currently in post-production, and scheduled for release by the end of the year on Aridne's own Shrine Records label.