Aranos is a unique musician, a classically-trained cellist and multi-instrumentalist whose resume is not filled with the usual chamber music ensembles, modern composition or minimalist drone work that one might expect. Instead, he has become noteworthy based on a series of uncategorizable collaborations with Nurse With Wound that sidestep all of the usual implications of avant-classical composition. Aranos' peculiar style is based in the Eastern European gypsy songs, trad-folk and rock music of his childhood in Czechoslovakia. From his collaborations with Steven Stapleton, he absorbed the techniques of dislocated psychedelia and surrealistic composition. Those techniques were in full display with the Irish jigs, skewed gypsy fiddles and cracked experimentation of his first two albums for his own Pieros label. For this album, Aranos collaborates with El Monte, the nom de guerre of Nick Mott of Volcano The Bear. Allied Cooking But Not As You Know It! is a collection of eleven improvised tracks, utilizing an array of instruments including the usual strings, shakahuchi, trumpet, saxophone, gongs and an array of homemade instruments. In a technique worthy of Eno's Oblique Strategies, each improvisation is based upon meditation on a nonsensical imperative ? "Think Like Warm Intestinal Being!" or "Think Like Madly Projected Fleshcups!" Their collaboration results in a series of low key tracks, meandering around a series of subtle conversations that scrupulously avoid musicality entirely. Several tracks create the abstract mental imagery of dark jungles and damp marshes, with the slowly rubbed cello strings creating an creeping atmosphere of dread. At other times, the music is decidedly more hyperactive, Aranos jumping over his strings like a frog in a frying pan. On "Think Like Veering Toads and Rude Proons!" an odd speaker glitch creates a brief piece of minimalist electronica worthy of the Raster-Noton label. Apparently, this was all recorded and mixed in the span of a week that El Monte spent in Ireland with Aranos. Unfortunately, this really shows, as the whole affair seems to suffer from a severe dearth of well-executed musical ideas, attempting to compensate for this lack with an overdose of creepy atmospherics, exclamation points and surreal gobbledygook. - Jonathan Dean