Oren Ambarchi
Oren Ambarchi's works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal.
From the late 90's his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum's Embrace Ambarchi has employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.
Ambarchi works with simple constructs and parameters; exploring one idea over an extended duration and patiently teasing every nuance and implication from each texture; the phenomena of sum and difference tones; carefully tended arrangements that unravel gently; unprepossessing melodies that slowly work their way through various permutations; resulting in an otherworldly, cumulative impact of patiently unfolding compositions.
Ambarchi has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Fennesz, Otomo Yoshihide, Pimmon, Keiji Haino, John Zorn, Rizili, Voice Crack, Jim O'Rourke, Keith Rowe, Phill Niblock, Dave Grohl, Gunter Muller, Evan Parker, z'ev, Toshimaru Nakamura, Peter Rehberg, Merzbow and many more. Since 2004 Ambarchi has worked with American avant metal outfit Sunn 0))) contributing to many of their releases and side-projects including their Black One album from 2005 and the recent Monoliths & Dimensions release.
For 10 years together with Robbie Avenaim, Ambarchi was the co-organiser of the What Is Music? festival, Australia's premier annual showcase of local and international experimental music. The festival hosted over 200 local and international performers. Ambarchi now curates the Maximum Arousal series at The Toff In Town in Melbourne and has recently co-produced an Australian television series on experimental music called Subsonics. Ambarchi recently co-curated the sound program for the 2008 Yokohama Triennale and the 21:100:100 show, One Hundred Sound Works by One Hundred Artists from the 21st Century, for the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Ambarchi has released numerous recordings for international labels such as Touch, Southern Lord, Table Of The Elements and Tzadik. In 2003 his live release Triste received an 'honourary mention' in the Prix Ars Electronica digital music category.
Selected Press
His buddy Fennesz gets all the ink as the next generation of guitar, but Ambarchi is the more nuanced and tactile player, still physically invoking that instrument, but making it sound like an abstract noisemaker without the help of a Powerbook. His 'tone' is somewhere between gamelan gong and an ungrounded wire, with subterranean throbs bristling with static and shorted-out crackle. You can feel every touch of his finger, every gesture of his body coming through the strings... retaining a hypnotic effect on listeners.
-- Dusted
It's like the weird, beautiful music you think you only hear in dreams.
-- Q Magazine
No matter how camouflaged, a guitar is a guitar. Though it may be hard to believe this flickering six-string sunspot emerged from an instrument that established Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, Ambarchi makes his solo talk without resorting to a single spell-breaking finger-tap, mathy scale, or screeching whammy bar. Wonder what he could do with 'Hot for Teacher'
-- Pitchfork
Ambarchi's sound has matured with grace and intelligence, eclipsing his previous work with a highly refined working ethic that is at once nuanced and cerebral. Never before has Van Der Roehe's infamous aphorism, 'Less is More' been more poignant. Absolutely sublime, and intelligently constructed.
-- White Line
Ambarchi has developed a highly original guitar technique which preserves the instrument's six string warmth even as it owes much to contemporary electronica. Indeed, his music has several affiliations with both post-Techno programming and post-Noise Improv. His compositions move along in a fog of understatement, neither settling into drones nor resolving into a barrage of noise. And for all his raucous avant punk roots, his playing has become positively approachable - he takes feedback overtones from more aggressive settings and re-presents them simply as sound. Exploring feelings of incompleteness, his pieces formulate sequences of notes that seem to require resolution, not only for the composer to withhold it. Notes hang in the air, while angular phrases are eccentrically looped. The softened attack of his notes makes for a mysterious, velvet-textured environment, in which the scenes he conjures up continually dissolve and re-form. This is intelligent, thoughtful, proactive ambience.
-- The Wire magazine