Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin, “Ghosted III” (Drag City, 2025)
This reliably fascinating trio is back with a third installment in their excellent Ghosted series. The label describes this one as “a little looser and wilder than before,” which is probably an accurate assessment, but the increased wildness is mostly relegated to Ambarchi’s forays into his table of electronics and effects pedals rather than any kind of larger penchant for volcanic crescendos. To my ears, this album actually feels a bit more subdued and jazz/fusion-inspired than the previous installments, but it also sometimes feels like an album-length expansion of Ghosted II’s strongest piece (“tre”). Given the latter, I would have expected to love this album much more than I do, but it feels like a bit of a mixed bag instead. That said, Ambarchi still has plenty of tricks up his sleeve, so the lesser pieces are interesting enough to (mostly) hold my attention in the long stretch between the album’s two killer highlights.
The album opens with the first of its two stellar highlights, “Yek,” which is centered around an endlessly repeating upright bass lick, a wonderfully simmering drum workout, and a circular harmonic motif from Ambarchi that unpredictably throws in new notes and fitfully blossoms into longer tendrils of melody. While all three musicians are always doing something extremely cool at all times, I was initially a bit underwhelmed, as the trio seemed to be treading water rather than evolving the piece into something more, but then a gong crashed and Ambarchi unexpectedly launched into a chiming arpeggio motif that felt like a vivid splash of harmonic color (and the bass line even changed slightly too!). That transformation proves to be just an interlude, however, as the band soon tightens up again and reverts back to the original harmonic motif. The rest of the piece then becomes a back-and-forth between those two themes that extends almost all the way to the end. Not ALL the way though, as the final appearance of the harmonic motif begins to distend and greedily accumulate additional layers until the final moments sound like I am being serenaded by a legion of celestial harp-wielding cherubs, which was one hell of a cool twist that I did not see coming.
The album’s other masterpiece (“Panj”) falls near the end of the album and opens in deceptively modest fashion, as the piece begins with little more than a slow-motion groove, a simple descending bass line, and something that sounds like a hazy, shimmering organ drone. That organ-like drone gradually becomes the soul of the piece, however, endlessly fading in and out of focus and erratically flickering into oscillations of varying speeds. It is a quietly mesmerizing place to linger and that is exactly what the trio do for a while, but Werliin kicks off the next phase with some chimes and Ambarchi’s sounds become more choppy, more ghostly, and increasingly disrupted with biting squawks of feedback. Then comes the next brilliant trick, as it soon sounds like Ambarchi’s sounds are suddenly submerged or dissolved into inaudibility to leave behind little more than rattles and a streaking spectral haze that is more felt than heard.
The remaining four pieces lamentably do not ascend to similar levels of inspiration, but some of them definitely have their moments. For the most part, Berthling and Werliin spend every single piece locked into an unchanging minimalist vamp (though Werliin is definitely a guy who can keep a vamp sizzling nicely on the drum kit). Given that restraint, however, these pieces tend to live or die on the strength of Ambarchi’s ideas and sometimes he seems pretty happy to just conjure a languorous mood for a while (especially on “Do” and “Shesh”). Elsewhere, the drum-less “Seh” evokes the austere, bass-driven jazz/post-rock fusion of Tortoise without ever catching fire. Alas. I do find “Chahar” quite fascinating, however. It starts off sounding like business-as-usual (repeating bass line, jazzy almost-breakbeat drumming), but the guitars err a bit on the side of searching and noodling. By the end, however, it becomes a layered fantasia of sweeping harmonics and a hovering organ-like drone that wildly oscillates and threatens to consume everything around it (and then Ambarchi ices the cake with a solo that sounds like a drugged calliope).
Given that only a few pieces here actually ascend to the expected level of greatness, this album would not be a good entry point for the curious, as the trio’s other two albums are considerably more impressive (or at least more instantly gratifying). That said, I sincerely doubt that anyone would dive into the third installment of a series first, so most people who hear this album will have already been primed by its predecessors. Unsurprisingly, that is my situation and that context nicely enhanced my appreciation for what would have otherwise been an underwhelming release. This is certainly not the trio’s strongest work, but I do genuinely admire how the group have managed to evolve and expand their sound within some brutally tight stylistic constraints. While I suspect the weaker pieces here would have eventually transformed into something greater if they’d been given a bit more time to gestate, my belief that Oren Ambarchi is one of the most inventive and consistently compelling guitarists around remains very much intact.
Listen here.
