Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin - Ghosted

The Quietus

I’m walking with my headphones on. It’s not the best context to hear this music but needs must. What starts with a twinkly loop rapidly escalates. Andreas Werliin’s drums swirl while Johan Berthling’s bass hovers across the beat. Oren Ambarchi’s guitar shimmers ominously in the background, sounding like a fried Hammond organ rather than six strings. My stride quickens even though the bpm of ‘II’, the second track on the trio’s new album Ghosted, doesn’t. The music reaches towards an ever deferred crescendo. As my pace accelerates, I lose awareness of my surroundings. Ambarchi’s guitar suddenly snaps into focus. It rises into a squeal. The intensity ascends. And then… Nothing.

I’m back to reality with almost violent effect. The track wasn’t meant to stop. Something’s gone wrong and my ancient mp3 player has reset itself. An accident that brings into clarity that this album needs to play uninterrupted to really do its magic. The trio explore the relationship between repetition and difference that’s long been a fascination in exploratory music, creating something that, disorientatingly, sounds equal parts quantized and free-flowing.

The outline of a motorik pulse drives the first two tracks, but Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin unearth colourful fluctuations from rigid rhythms. As if they’re teasing at just how much they can shuffle within a precariously balanced structure before knocking it over. There’s hints of TNT-era Tortoise throughout as repetitive phrases dance through jazzy variation. But the trio feel more interested in embracing rather than relieving tension. The tracks come across like sonic Rubik’s cubes, exploring the possible permutations of a confined structure.

Ambarchi’s guitar playing is on wonderfully nuanced form here, but the rhythm section hits quantum mechanical levels of intrigue. Berthling and Werliin’s unique interaction is clearest on ‘III’. The album’s longest piece, it affords them the duration needed for the cumulative effect to take hold. Berthling’s bass is a knotted loop of notes, full of constantly resetting momentum. Werliin’s drums scatter and skip through the tangle, growing in intensity as they find ever more microscopic gaps to shape with rhythm.

I read somewhere once that as maps get more accurate, borders get longer; the once comparatively straight lines getting more convoluted as detail increases. I don’t know if that’s true, but something similar happens here as the trio stretch grooves and find new spaces to fill. Ghosted is a record which depends on its cumulative effect. And in doing so, it reveals there’s the potential to find endless movement in even the most rigid structures.

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The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Martin Schray

Almost ten years ago, in one of my first reviews for this website, I reviewed Fire! feat. Oren Ambarchi: In the Mouth - a Hand . I had been completely blown away by this band’s music. Fire!’s brutal force, their way of combining prog rock with free jazz - incredible. Oren Ambarchi, the Australian drummer turned avant guitarist, acted as a kind of booster, amplifying everything in Fire!’s music. When I listen to this album today, it has lost none of its fascination, for me it’s one of the best recordings of this still young century.

Ambarchi has continued collaborating with Fire! in the following years, for example on the no less extraordinary She Sleeps, She Sleeps. But there were also cooperations with individual musicians of the trio, especially with bassist Johan Berthling, e.g. on My Days Are Parker Than Your Nights and Tongue Tied. What is more, all three were recently again part of his big project extraordinaire Live Hubris (Black Truffle, 2021). As one can see, they never lost track of each other.

So when Ghosted by Ambarchi and Fire!’s rhythm section was announced, my excitement was high, as one might imagine. Will the music of the trio sound as brute as it did ten years ago? Will it be more rhythm-orientated like Live Hubris? Or will it revive the drones of My Days Are Darker? To cut a long story short, it's a mixture of the last two. And that's absolutely great.

Ghosted's qualities lie in the way Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin adopt Fire!’s basic concept: The bass, almost minimalistically, holds a simple groove and the drums prance around it relatively freely. With Amabarchi as the locomotive, however, they develop a newfound interest in stripping back and zooming in on their music. On the one hand, the tracks are reduced, they are not bulging or bloated, on the other hand they float away from their center into the spherical.

This is not so much free jazz as rather some kind of ecstatic cosmic drive, as if Bill Frisell had fallen under the influence of mind-expanding drugs during an ECM recording (sorry, Bill). The kaleidoscope-like repetition of small, luminous motifs - primarily by Ambarchi, but also by the others who leave the given paths here and there - open the tracks. Time and timelessness coexist in a relaxed way, everything happens slowly and quickly at the same time.

Sometimes, when I have difficulties to fall asleep, I need music that guides me through the night. Then I listen to this album and imagine Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin playing in a dark Berlin techno club at 6 a.m., the people are exhausted, they hang around in their lounge suites, listening to the band’s organic sound of minimalist classical and relaxed Kraut Rock. This is music that builds and expands into meandering structures, eventually ending in the bright, nocturnal zones reminiscent of the brooding slow jazz landscapes of Bohren Und Der Club of Gore.

Ghosted is available on vinyl and as a download.

You can listen to two tracks and order it here: