But for some reason I was always interested in the weird sounds that it could make, so feedback, the interludes on the Pink Floyd records before the song started, Beatles, Hendrix, all these sorts of things. I was always attracted to the guitar, the sound of it. Oren Ambarchi: I grew up listening to all kinds of music, rock music and classic rock music and pop music.
That’s been a thread through your career that you play the guitar, but you don’t play it the way everybody else plays guitar. A lot of times people say electronics, but they’re just pedals.ĪD: There’s this wonderful story about the first time you picked up a guitar, and you’re just kind of banging on it with drumsticks. Oren Ambarchi: I don’t really play electronics. Then I started to get more and more interested in juxtaposing rhythms with more abstract sound or textures and having the two coexist with each other.ĪD: What kind of electronics do you play? There was rhythm in those records, but it was hidden. I kind of thought, why am I limiting myself to just guitar when I have all these beautiful instruments here? I was really liberating to play percussion. And then concurrently I was making an album Grapes from the Estate. I was also playing drums on a few noise rock things at the same time. We had a duo called Sun, and I started playing drums on that. I was setting a boundary.īut at one point, I was working in a pop context with a friend of mine, Chris Townend. When I started making solo records, I was kind of hardcore about it being guitar and only guitar. Oren Ambarchi: I started off as a drummer and stopped for quite some time, because I got more interested in electronics and guitar and that kind of took over. How does that inform what you’re doing now? Maybe those are the similarities.ĪD: You mentioned rhythm and I know you started as a drummer. Both albums have that sort of a long duration way of slowly exploring something. Also, things evolving slowly over time, where changes occur and you don’t even realize that they’re occurring. The thing that connects them is my interest in rhythm, for sure, and to an extent, repetition.
I think the big difference between the two is that Ghosted was three of us in a room, playing together, improvising, and Shebang! was sometimes made by working with people individually but it was definitely not a whole bunch of people playing together. Can you tell me a little about where these two records were coming from and how they continue and how they branch off from what you’ve been doing all along? It’s almost like this crazy, magical thing.” | j kellyĪquarium Drunkard: I’ve been thinking about the last two of your records, Shebang and Ghosted, and what they have in common but also how different they are. When I make a record of my own, it has to get to a point where I don’t understand how something’s happening. I just want to enjoy the strange sensation of listening to this thing. “I’m not the kind of guy who wants to know how something’s being done. “With the label and with what I do, I’m always attracted to things that don’t make sense to me,” Ambarchi explained. We found the conversation enlightening, but it necessarily leaves some mystery unexplored, since that is at the core of everything Ambarchi does.
ONE DOG STORY BANDCAMP FREE
We talked about these two projects, as well as Ambarchi’s roots in free jazz and tape experiments, his formative years in New York’s loft jazz scene, and his label, Black Truffle. Ghosted, a set of four lithe, limber jazz-leaning pieces recorded live in a room with all four players present, while Shebang follows Ambarchi’s more usual itinerant process, recording bits and parts with live and virtual collaborators, then piecing them together in post-production. In 2022, Ambarchi released two very different albums in quick succession. Experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi is one of music’s most prolific and inventive collaborators, working with everyone from Keith Rowe and Keiji Haino to Jim O’Rourke and Merzbow in largely improvised sessions, then layering the results into intricate constructed pieces that blur the boundaries between jazz, noise, rock, minimalism, drone and electronics.
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