American, Vienna-based guitarist Eric Arn calls himself in his social media accounts «guitar wrestler». The seven songs on Arn’s solo, fingerstyle steel-string acoustic guitar album, fixe idee, are described as having «a rolling, rambling guitar feel that builds sonic lattices which drift in the air like steel spiderwebs in the summer sky». The album was recorded between 2019 and 2023 in different locations in Vienna, in the Grotto, Arn’s home, and Kunstraum Ewigkeitsgasse.
Arn’s more than four-decade career has mined the nether regions of punk rock, avant-rock, free-improv, drone, and psychedelia, beginning with the Crystalized Movements band in the 1980s, and continuing with the Primordial Undermind band for over the last three decades. fixe idee features Arn’s inclusive and versatile sonic vision, as an improviser who has a great passion – or an obsession, a fixed, dominating idea, to explore the acoustic guitar as a physical instrument and its sonic palette, and the guitar as a catalyst for getting right with the Universe.
fixe idee begins with the American Primitive-esque, John Fahey-tinged, nuanced storytelling saga «Impromptu pour le fantôme». The following pieces stress that Arn converses with a few more seminal ghosts. The pastoral and openly emotional, song-like «Sunrills» and later «Gutbucket» converse with the folky, psychedelic songs of British guitarists and singer-songwriters John Martyn and John Renbourn. The low-fi, slide-based «Rhyolite» and «Ewigkeitsgasse» are free-associative, free improvisations that deliberately refuse to subscribe to any form or textures except for intuitive dancing off the edge of the fretboard. «Melathys» flirts again with American Primitive guitar but in a more structured, song-line manner. The album ends with the experimental «Bear, completely unraveled», flowing this time into Derek Bailey’s free territories but gravitating into an instant composition, cementing Arn as a guitarist with a strong-minded voice of his own, whose aesthetics dissolve genre and style conventions.
Eyal Hareuveni
Eric Arn (acoustic guitar)
