One other mesmerising album from the itinerant Australian, in collaboration with a number of the largest names in experimental music
There’s an exquisite double-exposure {photograph} of Nikola Tesla, on the very finish of the 19th century, seated in his laboratory studying a e-book as electrical energy arcs wildly about him. It jogs my memory of my first expertise of the What Is Music? competition in Melbourne, on the very finish of the 20th, the place, amongst 30 or so others standing again to reasonable the blasting wall of sound from whichever experimentalists have been testing the bounds of the PA, a younger girl selected to sit down on a wood chair near the stage and skim a paperback. It was the kind of arch show of pretentiousness you’ll be able to solely applaud.
To be honest, this was typically the posture of the performers too – seated and frowning over a laptop computer – because the competition’s rise coincided with that of a brand new wave of music produced by wrangling numerous sound sources and manipulating them with software program, results pedals and so forth. In probing how sound and music and noise may overlap, it’s maybe stunning how regularly the reply to the agreeably snotty provocation of the competition’s title was peals of computerised distortion produced by unassuming males in comfy pants. However even amongst them there have been clear outliers, producing astonishing works whose maximal quantity scrubbed your thoughts of thought and left you uplifted – the sound artwork equal of rising from a sweat lodge. (One yr, admittedly whereas struggling a head chilly, I skilled legendary Japanese psych-noise-improviser Keiji Haino ship such a maelstrom of closely effected solo guitar that it made the agitated air appear unbreathable, till ultimately I misplaced all imaginative and prescient and needed to grope my approach out of the venue to recuperate.) There was the cathartic rush of being sandblasted by the pattern deconstructions of Pita (the late Peter Rehberg, head of the vastly influential label Editions Mego); the Swiss duo Voice Crack, who positioned a desk of hacked toys, workplace gear and photoelectric devices in the midst of the viewers, switched the lights off and let all of it flicker and surge into an industrial bedlam; and the Finnish digital group Pan Sonic, whose crisp beats and tones of monumental simplicity have been like HAL 9000 transferring all energy from life help to a DJ set.
What Is Music? was based in Sydney in 1994 by drummer Robbie Avenaim and drummer-guitarist Oren Ambarchi, of their younger twenties, bandmates from noise-punk group Phlegm. They’d just lately returned from sojourns in New York Metropolis that had seen them not solely uncovered to a number of the free improvisation and experimental greats of the downtown music scene, however pulled onstage to play with them. An opportunity introduction led to underground eminence John Zorn recruiting the pair to play for his 40th birthday celebrations on the seminal venue the Knitting Manufacturing facility, regardless of having by no means earlier than heard them. Visits to Japan discovered a equally welcoming, open-minded dedication to collaboration and led them to work with key figures within the noise music scene. With such experiences ringing of their ears, they sought to ship adventurous audiences to a few of Sydney’s extra boundary-pushing musicians. What Is Music? – doubling down on the Knitting Manufacturing facility’s What Is Jazz? Pageant – embraced all-comers from lowbrow to intellectual to brows shaved off utterly. After increasing to Melbourne and Brisbane, it turned a cornerstone of Australia’s experimental music scene over its close to twenty years.
The scene that the competition nurtured and networked has since produced a number of figures now on the vanguard of experimental music internationally, as performers, producers and label heads, and maybe none extra so than Ambarchi himself. Now 53, he’s a number one proponent of processed guitar, and an occasional power-drummer, who has carried out and recorded with a who’s who of latest music (together with everybody talked about right here up to now), taking in minimalism, drone, doom metallic, krautrock, free improvisation, and extra. He was named joint experimental artist of the yr in 2014 by Pitchfork, and his information seem in albums-of-the-year lists in Rolling Stone, The Quietus and The Wire, which had his greying curly mop on its cowl just a few years in the past. His label Black Truffle helps new experimental music from throughout the globe, in addition to uncovering and reissuing archival works. He excursions relentlessly, such that he can’t actually be stated to be based mostly wherever: he’s as more likely to be present in a short-term lease in Berlin as on a good friend’s sofa in Tokyo, ducking into studios together with his collaborators to report improvised sketches in between gigs and competition appearances.
Such is his repute that the largest names of their fields will, in an egoless approach, provide responses to prompts he offers so he may later thread them by way of one among his meticulously produced “solo” albums. A brand new launch, Shebang – any try to debate “his newest album” is thwarted by his being so prolific as to at all times outrun you; he’s been concerned in no less than two different vital releases since I began penning this – is once more the results of pulling collectively a distant supergroup for a masterful post-production collaboration.
Whereas he’s taken to crediting his devices as “guitars & whatnot”, Ambarchi just isn’t a guitarist within the standard sense. It’s extra correct to say he makes use of a guitar somewhat than that he performs one. (I’ve a reminiscence of one other What Is Music? efficiency that includes a line-up of eight guitarists – led by Scott Horscroft, later the producer and engineer for the likes of The Presets and Empire of the Solar – shredding and rock-posturing however with their output dialled all the way down to zero, so all you might hear was the vigorous scratching of their plectrums, earlier than very, very progressively they have been turned as much as develop into audible.) Ambarchi runs his guitars by way of an array of results, and thumbs and faucets the strings to supply pure ringing tones, deep bass notes that thoonk like a heavy stone dropped in water, buzzes and whirrs, or luscious digital sweeps. The method is cryptic – is he generally triggering samples? are these piano notes produced by treating the guitar sound ultimately? – although he favours hands-on instruments akin to results pedals over software program. Lately he’s been significantly keen on using classic Leslie speaker cupboards, whose mechanically rotating drums and horns are the supply of the distinctive Hammond organ sound of ’60s jazz, or, in the event you like, the swirling, dreamy impact on vocals akin to Ozzy Osbourne’s on Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan”.
Whereas he can produce an unsettling squall – as per the ultimate observe on 2016’s Hubris, thrown right into a prismatic aura with a synth set to self-destruct by American drill-and-bass pioneer Keith Fullerton Whitman – extra typically his shimmering Leslie swells are hypnotic, and so they’re regularly wrapped round rhythm tracks equipped by a bunch of good gamers in quite a lot of idioms. The place Hubris is propelled by the rock drumming of long-time shut collaborator Joe Talia, elsewhere we hear beats from English digital producer Mark Fell or Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista. On 2019’s Simian Angel, Baptista performs some exuberant berimbau, the single-stringed bow performed percussively and usually related to capoeira martial arts. Ambarchi’s seek for totally different sound palettes has discovered him collaborating with minimalist pioneer Charlemagne Palestine, Egyptian-Canadian oud participant Sam Shalabi, Japanese noise maestro Merzbow, and on and on.
His spellbinding recordings can really feel like travelling, the place at occasions you look out the window and realise the panorama’s modified. The place are we? That impact is nearly literal on 2014’s Quixotism, when a pneumatic sound harking back to a practice horn alerts a border crossing from a popping digital loop that remembers Oval’s ’90s glitch right into a passage escorted by grasp Japanese tabla participant U-zhaan. This shouldn’t suggest disorientation; these are rewarding works to which you wish to return repeatedly. However neither is such music particularly soothing: there’s a rigidity that retains you leaning in. The listener is suspended in its repetitions, which hardly ever resolve however shift into new variations.
Shebang has a kinship with the free-jazz depth of Ghosted, which Ambarchi recorded collectively within the studio with the Swedish duo of bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin and launched earlier this yr. Ambarchi’s guitar-shimmer is sort of a fog creeping in among the many darkish, moist streets of a slow-burn thriller, a sense heightened by loping double-bass grooves, once more repeated at size and unresolved. However the place Ghosted traded in a type of apprehension, Shebang – a return to distant collaboration with one other digital ensemble of audacious variety – conveys one thing extra akin to pleasure.
If the temper is lighter, Shebang’s four-part composition nonetheless leaves you dizzying and repeatedly caught unawares, all in 35 minutes. It opens with Ambarchi taking part in solo, chopping up some vibrant, sparkly guitar traces right into a twitchy groove faintly harking back to Speaking Heads’ Stay in Mild (or the Afrofunk kinds that impressed it). The clipped tones additionally once more recall glitch, but it surely’s a reminder that whereas that might be a chilly style – by design, by way of a kind of mental machismo – it proved a stepping stone to making use of such strategies in a heat, inviting approach. Beneath this we come to detect plaintive voice-like sounds and a touch, virtually a wink, of Leslie-cabinet swirl. Joe Talia is again on drums, and from his sprightly entry on experience cymbals he unifies the album’s developments with a brisk, gentle contact.
We’re invited to the second part with the looks of some breathy, flutter-tongued bass clarinet figures from Australian Sam Dunscombe. Bass clarinet is having a second in popular culture resulting from Björk’s wholehearted deployment on her newest album, however Dunscombe, now based mostly in Berlin, is a measure too summary for the charts. Her compositional work with pc music and discipline recordings led to final yr’s debut solo album Outdoors Ludlow / Desert Disco, an absorbing piece of sound artwork based mostly on digitising the contents of a chunk of quarter-inch audio tape she discovered snared on a cactus within the Mojave Desert, in addition to atmospheric recordings she made within the close by ghost city. And, like a ghost, her growling clarinet shortly disappears on Shebang, though forensic re-listens, or maybe some fortunate guesses, may decide her presence as a sound supply in different elements.
The album shifts to a quieter passage wherein a guitar stutters a single notice over deep bass tolls and Talia’s deft addition of snare. Collectively, their unresolved repetitions provide that trademark rigidity, like a key slipped into the keyhole however by no means turned. It’s as if we’re ready for one thing, and it seems we’re ready for B.J. Cole. Cole is a legendary English pedal-steel guitarist who for the reason that late ’60s has sessioned and carried out with everybody from Humble Pie and John Cale to Spiritualized and Sting. His most well-known trainspotter second is in offering the Americana on Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”, however Shebang’s liner notes helpfully direct us to Cole’s 1972 solo album The New Hovering Canine, an astounding prog-folk-country-everything-else extravaganza that little doubt the insatiable crate-digger Ambarchi got here throughout sooner or later. Right here, as Talia provides considered tom fills and Ambarchi’s oxygenated Leslie sounds rise and fall, Cole arrives with lovely, pedal-steel thrives, filling the ear with lush sound.
There are stabs of bending digital bass and a momentary sequence of idiophonic sounds that recall early ’80s Tangerine Dream, after which half three washes in like a seashore tide, delivering Chris Abrahams from The Necks. Abrahams’ rolling improvised piano carries this part into extra acquainted territory, a sense enhanced by double-bassist Johan Berthling’s inclusion, taking part in a two-figured line within the closest factor to a traditional chord development probably heard on an Ambarchi report. It’s shot by way of, thoughts, with quite a lot of angular synth sounds from one other of Ambarchi’s long-time buddies, Jim O’Rourke. Unusually a songwriter in addition to an experimental sound artist and film-score composer, O’Rourke might be finest identified for having been a member of Sonic Youth. Now Tokyo based mostly, he has collaborated multi-instrumentally with Ambarchi on a number of albums, together with Hubris, Quixotism and the raga-like Therefore (2018), and within the usually convened trio-de-force they kind with Keiji Haino.
O’Rourke’s sawing interjections right here put together us for the album’s ultimate motion, wherein Abrahams’ tumbling piano ebbs in favour of some busy, resonant percussive-string taking part in, like that of a hammered dulcimer. In reality, it’s 12-string guitar from Julia Reidy, one other Australian experimentalist now based mostly in Berlin, whose idiosyncratic choosing type was, years in the past, the unique impetus for the album, after Ambarchi heard Reidy taking part in in Melbourne and issued an invite to report some supply materials. The chiming tone Reidy achieves right here is mesmerising. (As is Reidy’s intimate solo album World in World, launched this yr, which marries digital sounds and hazy, autotuned vocals with an electrical guitar customised with moveable frets to allow unconventional tunings.) The digital bass then returns to its deep soundings, Talia raises the temperature, and Abrahams and Cole make re-appearances alongside Reidy in an ecstatic swirl of sound. By the point you discover O’Rourke’s return, the remainder of the cohort are receding, and Shebang concludes with bilious clouds of his synth and a wry two-note coda.
If regularly shifting, Ambarchi’s works don’t usually search to supply an emotional launch. That makes him totally different from, say, Nils Frahm, whose unfolding compositions carry listeners aloft on a path to euphoria. Frahm’s audiences know the place they’re heading, like studying Dan Brown – music for airport novels. Ambarchi’s abstractions are inclined to allow you to draw your individual conclusions. Is it pleasure right here, then? For me, sure, however I additionally discovered pleasure just a few years in the past in a efficiency of Nazoranai, the spectacular trio wherein Ambarchi performs thunderous drums with Keiji Haino and bassist Stephen O’Malley from doom metallists Sunn O))), which the wincing ushers at Arts Centre Melbourne may solely stand up to in 10-minute shifts. What’s music stays a reside query. So maybe a studying of Shebang’s uplifting temper owes extra to the suggestibility of its cowl picture of a celebratory slice of rainbow cake, or the dachshunds in social gathering hats depicted inside. Or maybe, in these grimly unsettling occasions, we’re simply searching for a elevate – streamers, social gathering poppers, and a spherical of musical chairs.
