Oren Ambarchi - Hubris
Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Oren Ambarchi
Hubris
[Editions Mego; 2016]
Rating: 4/5
It’s a diverse group and they’re doing some excellent work. Really great stuff. And let me tell you something, people: it is going to pay off. You can count on that. We’re dedicated, relentless, keeping the pulse steady. It’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of hard work, but we’re going to make it count. This beat is relentless, and it will carry on. It drives us to work hard and to continue to strive for a more perfect realization of our dreams. We circle in on our sure moment. Our chance for harmony. We will make it there, I am certain, and we will do it together.
The climax is inevitable. We all know it, we’re all here to win — but before that, let’s give a hand to the team. What a team we have working with us. Oren Ambarchi on guitar, spring loaded, give it up for Oren. [applause] What a virtue it is to have a talent like him with us. Mark Fell of SND, master of timbres. Will Guthrie, Joe Talia, our dual drummers, keeping it momentous. Joerg Hiller, Crys Cole. Arto Lindsay on a stunning guitar riff. Jim O’Rourke from Chicago — let’s hear it for Jim. [applause] Ricardo Villalobos. Keith Fullerton Whitman. The minimalists, we love them.
They make the work feel fun, folks. We are lifted by their spirits, their commitment, and their patience in enduring this difficult but important journey. They have taken this work and truly transformed it with their vision. What began as a glimmer of an idea is now a shining golden beacon, representative of all our collective goals and ambitions. It is a symbol of our work ethic: charging on but never losing pace, modulated in flawless time, happy in its cycle, unscorned and unchanged. Sly and quick and with expensive taste. Gaudy, too clever even, but incomparably cool. A first-class assembly of minds.
We find ourselves at a precipice overlooking a brave new country. A new place to make our claim. I look out, and I see unspoiled riches yet to be discovered. Fresh ears, ready to hear new ideas. Harmolodic pinch harmonics. Light metal blues and green bulbs breaking on red rock. Horns that sort of burn. Double drum kits cluttering the stereo image. Indie interludes with intimate field loops. Stochastic studies. A virgin landscape of possibilities. This is as real as I can get.
This is the solo, our great guitar moment. We can do anything in this space and it’ll be the right decision. We are fated to find the key. We trace the outline of the new truth. We are living the dream. Let the energy guide us. Just…y’know, remember also to stay on message. Because everyone’s listening; they treat it like scripture. They feel every vibration, maybe more than you do. They’ll be hearing it again and again for years after, and they’ll know what you really meant, what you really felt in that moment, so be honest about it. Think about how your energy affects those people out there. How it makes them feel. Is it a good thing? Then let’s carry on.
But I gotta tell you, just thinking about the next step has me fired up. It’s coming, people. It’s a good feeling. It’s inspiring.
It’s intangible, you know. What is that feeling? You know what it is? It’s imagination. The imagination is set free. We are set free to create nonsense.
I chase a thought, and the truth of it echoes back in a loop, and it sounds like music. A bicameral instruction. We absorb it and push forward. We make the work work for us.
This reminds me of an anecdote. The newest one I have, the unspoiled one. I think back to a time not long ago, in a less civilized age, of the ways we found our discipline and how we decided to use it for the good of our fellow person. That’s the gist of it anyway.
Where was I?
Pitchfork 75
Since the late ’90s, Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi has composed drone metal and free jazz, sculpted ambient soundscapes and collaborated with many (if not most) of experimental music's biggest names. Over his prolific career, Ambarchi has toured with Sunn O))), played with Boris and Merzbow, drummed with Keiji Haino—and that's just a drop in the bucket. In many ways, Ambarchi is a quintessential musician’s musician: an adept drummer and guitarist, hugely respected within his own scene, whose fans study his work like stoned math majors pouring over a Mandelbrot set. Whether inspired by krautrock, metal, or jazz, Ambarchi’s work demands patience and attention, but along with his singular musicianship, Ambarchi's work reaches for the extremes of human experience, the sorrowful, the sublime.
On his latest album, the three-part, forty-minute Hubris, Ambarchi teams up with an army of avant-garde musicians, among them Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos. O’Rourke is a frequent collaborator with Ambarchi (together the two made 2011’s Indeed and last year’s Behold) and his presence is felt throughout the record. Both musicians are experts at locking into grooves, then breaking out of them in strange, unthinkable ways. On “Hubris Pt. 1,” Ambarchi lays down an arpeggiated guitar loop which serves as a baseline for his collaborators to play off and the track’s 22-minute runtime provides an ample canvas. According to Ambarchi, the composition was inspired by New Wave and disco—particularly Wang Chung’s soundtrack to the 1985 thriller To Live and Die in L.A.—but its sound and structure owe much to the patient loops of minimal techno.
As with some forms of meditation, where practitioners are taught to focus on subtle differences in the body’s perception of the world, Ambarchi and his partners introduce ripples that swell into waves. While it's hard to parse who is responsible which sounds, O’Rourke's guitar-synth stands out, evoking retro graphics, John Carpenter soundtracks, and William Friedkin thrillers. Similar to the Field, Ambarchi’s loops instill a sense of wonder with their unflagging momentum, but while Axel Willner has a tendency toward big crescendos, “Pt. 1” stays rooted. Tension is heightened, but there's only a small release, just a fading sense that something beautiful is gone.
“Pt. 3,” which includes contributions from Villalobos and DNA’s Arto Lindsay, is a different sort of beast—as unhinged and electric as anything Ambarchi has recorded. Villalobos, a godhead in the minimal techno arena, once sampled a small portion of Christian Vander’s “Baba Yaga La Sorciere,” turning it into 17 minutes of rhythmic ecstasy. Similarly, Villalobos, along with drummers Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, bring a circularity to “Pt. 3,” with Lindsay's guitar adding a no wave edge to the funk-prog undercurrent.
Similarly, Villalobos, along with drummers Joe Talia and Will Guthrie, bring a similar circularity to “Pt. 3,” with Lindsay's guitar adding a no wave edge to the funk-prog undercurrent. Unlike “Pt. 1,” which stays within set confines, “Part 3” sheds formal constraints gleefully. By the time for Ambarchi’s guitars join Lindsay's, the track has become a maximalist hurricane of weird.
Taken from a distance, Hubris is shaped something like an hourglass, with “Pt. 2” serving as a connector between the two halves. Tranquil guitar and sampled voices serve as an homage to Albert Marcoeur, a French art rocker known for sampling nursery rhymes, paints a pastoral picture. The track serves as a palette cleanser between the ethereal momentum of “Pt. 1” and the chaos of “Pt. 3.” It also puts a spotlight back on Ambarchi’s guitar, which is ostensibly what he is most famous for. In some ways “Pt. 2” is a synecdoche for Ambarchi himself. Few artists could assemble a group of musicians like that those found on Hubris at all, but Ambarchi lets everyone do their part, then fade into the background. It's the difference between hubris and vision.
Sat Nov 12 06:00:00 GMT 2016