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Oren Ambarchi

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Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin, “Ghosted II” (Drag City, 2024)

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This singular trio composed of Australian avant-guitar visionary Oren Ambarchi and the rhythm section from Sweden’s Fire!/Fire! Orchestra first surfaced back in 2022 with Ghosted and they are now back with an aptly named sequel.  While that earlier album was inconveniently eclipsed by Ambarchi’s solo Shebang album for me that year, I connect quite a bit more with Ghosted II, as the trio’s vision seems to have fully blossomed this time around.  I have admittedly grumbled in the past about my preference for Ambarchi’s earlier, more abstract work over his more recent jazz/fusion/krautrock-inspired rhythmic excursions, but this album happily strikes a near-perfect balance of those two sides, as drummer Andreas Werliin’s Latin-esque percussion workouts are an ideal backdrop for Ambarchi’s flickering and impressionistic guitar phantasms.  Also, I think I finally grasped that “ghosted” is a perfect description of Ambarchi’s guitar aesthetic in this context, as his playing is abstracted into an incorporeal shimmer in nearly every piece (and the few well-chosen exceptions make quite an impact).

I have quickly grown to love this album, but It took me some time to warm to the opening “en,” as Ambarchi’s playing is primarily limited to gently warbling and painterly smears while Johan Berthling’s bass playing is seemingly relegated to just a single jazzy yet endlessly repeating riff.  Once I listened to it on headphones, however, I quickly understood that the piece was essentially a killer drum showcase for Werliin: Ambarchi is providing subtle coloration, Berthling is holding down the pulse, and Werliin is absolutely tearing it up on a rolling and clattering groove.  As I am always a fan of great drummers given space to go off, merely shifting my focus to Werliin instantly worked wonders in deepening my appreciation for the piece.  I found some other quiet delights as well (the way Ambarchi’s guitar sometimes sounds like an organ fading in and out of focus, the way the final fade out reveals new details in the bass line, etc.), but the other three pieces still feel stronger simply because they are more of a full-band effort.  In the following “två,” for example, Berthling’s lovely bass harmonic motif is the heart of a stellar foray into a simmering and austere Tortoise-esque groove.  Ambarchi’s contribution is still quite muted (woozy vapor trails, gently oscillating shimmer), but the trio make the most out of the piece’s spaciousness, as the vacuum of space makes a mere kick drum thump or bass throb feel sensual and significant.

That said, I am first and foremost an Oren Ambarchi fan, so the album’s second half is where Ghosted II truly catches fire for me, as he finally emerges from ”ambient haze” mode to unleash some extremely cool motifs of his own.  On “tre,” a wonderfully warm double bass hook and a stumbling off-kilter beat provide a backdrop for Ambarchi’s journey from Boards of Canada-esque heat haze to a gorgeous and vaguely Japanese-sounding cascade of harp-like harmonics.  The closing “fyra” features still more harmonic magic, as Ambarchi’s gently jangling and chiming strums provide the lovely central motif.  Werliin is in especially fine form on that piece as well, gamely unleashing yet another quiet storm of clattering and rolling fills.  

Aside from that, “fyra” also features the single biggest twist on the entire album: a guitar motif that actually sounds like a guitar.  Notably, said motif is essentially just two arpeggiated chords, but Ambarchi seems to have stumbled upon two of the most magical chords that a guitar can possibly produce, as it feels like I am being drawn deeper and deeper into a psychotropic rabbit hole every time they surface.  In fact, listening to “fyra” feels a lot like the aftermath of looking at the sun for too long: the recognizable world is still there, but it has the feel of a shimmering mirage and the colors all feel newly strange and unfamiliar.  To lesser degree, the same thing could be said of the entire album: the subtly funky bass and drum grooves are strong enough to be satisfying on their own, but Ambarchi’s beautifully understated and spectral playing elevates what would otherwise be a cool jazz trio album into something deliciously elusive, dreamlike, and unique. 

Listen here.

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Oren Ambarchi, “Shebang” (Drag City, 2022)

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Few artists have consistently fascinated and perplexed me quite like Oren Ambarchi, as I absolutely loved his early solo guitar albums like Grapes From the Estate, then witnessed him spend the next 15 or 20 years exploring improvisatory and rhythmic-driven detours to continually intensifying and breathless acclaim. I imagine it feels somewhat akin to being a Velvet Underground fan encountering unanimous rapturous praise for their post-Cale albums–I get the appeal, but that would not be my personal go-to era if I wanted to illustrate that band’s greatness. Then again, maybe my perspective on Ambarchi’s evolution would shift dramatically if I just liked jazz fusion more.

In any case, I can certainly understand the unusual trajectory from Oren’s viewpoint, as few would pass up a chance to form a trio with Jim O’Rourke and Keiji Haino and jamming with talented friends over mutant krautrock/fusion grooves seems like a hell of a lot more fun than making slow-motion guitar magic by yourself (can’t fault a guy for loving spontaneity and challenging new collaborations). Both spontaneity and inspiring guest performances abound on Shebang, as Ambarchi enlisted quite a killer (virtual) ensemble, resulting in one of my favorite of his albums in recent memory (2016’s Hubris being the other serious contender).

The album is essentially a single 35-minute piece, but there are four numbered sections that segue seamlessly into one another. The first begins with a quirkily rhythmic and twinkling electric guitar motif that is soon joined by additional layers that bring unpredictably interwoven melodies and a stilted, oddly timed funkiness. It does not take long before the sheer intricacy and rhythmic sophistication of its various moving parts starts to feel dazzling and virtuosic, but the piece soon gets even better as it becomes more bass-heavy while bleary shades of psychedelia begin to bleed in. The second section announces itself when Joe Talia’s skittering, shuffling drums emerge from a haze of feedback and shimmer. Curiously, all of the prominent themes from the first section fall away for a very stripped down palette of drums, subtle piano, rhythmic palm-muted guitar, and an occasional bass clarinet skwonk, but that downshift into simmering spaciousness nicely set the stage for me to be completely wrong-footed by the inspired appearance of BJ Cole’s Hawaiian-sounding pedal steel.

While Ambarchi’s primary influences for Shebang were ostensibly folks like Pat Metheny and Henry Kaiser, I would be hard pressed to think of any album at all that resembles the singular fusion/exotica/psych/broken funk stew conjured by his murderers’ row of remote collaborators once the piece properly catches fire. Moreover, by the time the third section begins, I have absolutely no idea what Ambarchi himself is even playing, as it sounds like a live recording of a Keith Jarrett trio or something (albeit one with added spice from Jim O’Rourke’s spacy synth intrusions). Shebang‘s final act then turns up the heat even more with Jules Reidy’s viscerally jangling 12-string while Talia continues to unleash a quiet storm of absolutely killer drumming en route to a satisfyingly cathartic climax.

Notably, however, there is an unusual amount of restraint on display, which makes Shebang considerably more compelling and memorable than the standard “get some friends together for a wild improv session” trajectory–aside from its tight and exacting craftsmanship, the most striking feature of the album is how the piece seems to linger in a state of suspended animation even as it steadily intensifies. It reminds me of Terry Riley’s In C, except instead of monomaniacally playing one note, Ambarchi’s ensemble seems to endlessly riff around a single chord while stealthily ratcheting up the tension and complexity without ever granting the release of chord changes or a volcanic, howling crescendo. It is quite a tour de force, combining unique vision with absolutely brilliant execution.

Listen here.

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Oren Ambarchi, “Grapes From The Estate” (Touch (2004)/Black Truffle (2018))

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Newly reissued on his own Black Truffle imprint, this 2004 album (originally released on Touch) stands as one of the most enduring and transcendent gems in Ambarchi’s lengthy discography. Obviously, he has released plenty of interesting and inventive music since, yet his early 2000s Touch albums are the ones that resonate most deeply with me and this one is my favorite. Grapes From The Estate has a wonderfully languorous and lovely melodic sensibility akin to relative contemporaries like Labradford, yet that is only one of the many threads that Ambarchi pulls into this quietly visionary suite. Part of me wishes Oren would someday return to something resembling the languid, sun-dappled beauty of this era, but I would be hard-pressed to come up with a valid artistic reason for him to do so, as I cannot imagine a more perfect distillation of this aesthetic vein being possible. Almost 15 years later, Grapes still sounds like a wonderfully distinctive, absorbing, and unrepeatable convergence of vision, inspiration, and execution.

The soul has been poetically referred to countless times as “the ghost in the shell” and that phrase keeps relentlessly popping into my head whenever I search for words to describe Ambarchi’s aesthetic on this album. Naturally, a small part of me is now worried that I have begun thinking entirely in clichés, yet it is unquestionably apt for my purposes here: Grapes From The Estate sounds like the spectral residue that would remain if the shell of a great dub-techno album were eviscerated. It is not quite that simple and linear, of course, but these four pieces make a lot of sense when viewed in that light. The opening “Corkscrew” is an especially radical example of that vision, as feels like a bass line that has been completely dissolved to leave only a quavering thrum of deep harmonics. There is also arguably a rhythmic component of subtle clicks and pops, which only adds to the sensation that Ambarchi has slowed time to a crawl to magnify all of the quietest, most fragile sounds and allow them to linger around long enough to get the attention they would have never gotten otherwise.

The closing “Stars Aligned, Web Spun” is similarly extreme in its understated, slow-motion minimalism, as it is initially just a single obsessively repeated note, which is a cunning bit of sleight of hand, as the real action is lurking in the depths: a deep bass drone fitfully throbs to weave a shuddering undercurrent of overtones and seismic oscillations. Without decent speakers or suitably extreme volume, it is probably easy to miss all the low-end dynamics, but “Stars Aligned” gradually becomes quite lovely in the foreground too, as a lazy trickle of gentle harmonics steadily forms a rippling haze of heavenly harmonies and lingering afterimages. Both of those bookends are certainly inventive and assured sound art that display a singular lightness of touch and attention to detail, as well as an almost supernatural degree of patience. As fine as they are, however, the album’s greatest moments lie between them.

Initially, “Girl With The Silver Eyes” feels an awful lot like a reprise of “Corkscrew,” albeit one where the bass harmonics actually cohere into a languorous groove of sorts. In fact, Ambarchi soon bolsters that foundation into a slow-building simmer with some throbbing sub bass and a slowly shuffling snare rhythm thrown in, marking the first appearance of any conventional percussion on the album. He also fleshes out the piece’s melodic components in characteristically hyper-minimal and restrained fashion, as a sleepy flow of electronic bloops and an occasional electric piano or organ note hint that some kind of actual song may eventually take shape. It is debatable as to whether that ever happens, but something else extremely cool happens instead, as rippling cascades of irregular arpeggios unexpectedly blossom forth, which feels like quite a dazzling splash of color in this slow-boiling context.

Notably, that is the first recognizable appearance of a guitar on the album, which reminds me that Ambarchi was primarily known as an experimental guitarist around this time. With Grapes, he expanded that palette dramatically, though I would be hard-pressed to guess where most of these sounds originated. Still, Oren’s newly neglected guitar is wielded to great effect when it appears, as the notes in “Silver Eyes” tumble blearily into the picture and hang there lysergically. Ambarchi’s guitar talents also surface in the following “Remedios The Beauty” (now acoustic). Again, Oren uses his guitar sparingly yet achieves maximum effect, playing just one ringing note at a time and using the sharpness of the attack to cut through the blurry, undulating web of pulses that form the piece’s foundation. The rest of the piece is certainly strong enough without that enhancement though, as those pulses make for an appealingly melodic and woozily dreamlike hook, which Ambarchi later builds into a crescendo of buried strings, layers of arpeggios, and a countermelody of sustained, descending piano tones. He walks a fine line here, masterfully holding together the album’s warmly beautiful, hypnagogic spell, while stealthily incorporating some actual solidity and structure.

It is always an interesting experience to revisit a beloved album from an earlier era in my life to see how it holds up against both my evolving taste and the passage of time. When I first heard Grapes, I immediately appreciated that it was an excellent album, but it seemed like very much a part of the Touch milieu (which was having quite a hot streak in those days with Philip Jeck, Phil Niblock, Fennesz, and others). I did not fully grasp, however, how truly unusual this album was nor did I know enough about Ambarchi to appreciate what a leap forward this album was for him.

I am not sure if it is quite accurate to say that Grapes was ahead of its time, as it was very much of its time in many ways—it just happened to be an especially brilliant and seamless synthesis of seemingly disparate threads. It was certainly ahead of my time though, as I have much deeper appreciation for details and textures these days. Consequently, I am now properly dazzled by how Ambarchi was able to transform the idea of a bass line into something that resembles slowly moving droplets of shivering mercury and how he was able to slowly transform just a few repeating notes into a quietly gorgeous 20-minute epic of massing overtones and oscillations. As such, the benefit of hindsight has opened my eyes quite a bit and revealed depths to this album that only deep listening can reveal: I used to like Grapes because it had a couple of excellent songs, but now I love it because it is a masterfully executed and elegant tour de force of wonderful textural touches and simmering dynamic restraint. This is more than a fine album—it is legitimately great art.

Listen here.