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Oren Ambarchi

Country: AustraliaMember of: Menstruation Sisters, Nazoranai

Oren Ambarchi, born in Sydney in 1969, is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with a long interest in going beyond conventional instrumental approaches. His work centres on the electric guitar, re-routed, in the words of The Wire, into a zone of alien abstraction where it is no longer easily identifiable as itself, but rather a laboratory for extended sonic investigation, from subterranean bass pulses to shimmering harmonics.

Simian Angel
LP version. After a trilogy of spectacular explorations of relentlessly driving rhythms -- Sagittarian Domain, Quixotism, and Hubris -- Simian Angel finds Oren Ambarchi renewing his focus on his singular approach to the electric guitar, returning in part to the spacious canvases of classic releases like Grapes From The Estate (BT 036LP/TO 061CD) while also following his muse down previously unexplored byways. Reflecting Ambarchi's profound love of Brazilian music, Simian Angel features the remar…
Oglon Day
Slightly damaged copies, reduced price. Few available Full title: A Loss Permitted To Open Its Eyes For But Three Hours And There Glimpsed, Finally In Focus A Mystery That Begs Earnestly, "Ask Me Nothing" Now, Once More The Problem Is Yours Alone. Experimental music pioneer Keiji Haino, one of the most mysterious and influential figures to emerge from the Japanese psychedelic underground, teams up with Charles Hayward, British drummer and founding member of This Heat and Camberwell Now, on a new…
Patience Soup
Patience Soup presents the entirety of a live performance from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Jim O'Rourke, and Japanese underground legend Phew that took place at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Center on November 4th, 2015. Known to many listeners outside Japan primarily for her early collaborations with members of Can, Phew has been undergoing something of a creative renaissance in the last few years, prolifically recording and releasing a body of work that strips away the band arrangements presen…
Hence
Hence is the third collaborative release from Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke, following on from Behold (EMEGO 176LP, 2015). Building on the refined combination of electronics and acoustic instrumentation found on their previous releases, Hence presents two side-long pieces combining synthesizers, heavily effected guitar tones, and tabla rhythms played by special guest Uzhaan. On the first side, an explosive opening chord sends out ripples of sparse, irregularly pulsing guitar and synthesizer…
Oren Ambarchi, crys cole, Leif Elggren
Edition of 300. The only thing Australia, Canada and Sweden have in common is taking in an abstract position in a vague situation! In July 2016, a strong arctic wind blew open the windows that separate the mean streets of Stockholm from the city's legendary EMS Studios. Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole and Leif Elggren were the only folks present in the studio at that point; not much could be done besides making the best out of a bad situation. Ambarchi burned the studio carpet to stay warm; Cole made a…
Panama / Suez
A-Ton is proud to announce Panama / Suez, the first EP by trio Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger and Phillip Sollmann (aka Efdemin). The three multi-instrumentalists collaborated with the goal of creating subtly shifting musical passageways: sonic routes that run between continents of musical category. The results are two variations of kraut-y, groove-based post-techno that unfurl through mutating polyrhythms and chiming, ethereal guitar play – a rare moment of guitar and techno in deep embrace. Wi…
Face Time
Face Time is the second release from the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, and James Rushford, following on from their 2016 debut Pale Calling (BT 020LP). Recorded at the GRM studios in Paris in June 2017, the record immediately returns to the idiosyncratic sound-world of the trio's first release, a simmering stew of electronic smears, pitched-down animal moans, and mysteriously emotive microtonal organ chords. But before long the record takes an unexpected turn, as sounds that initially ent…
Stacte Karaoke II
What happens when Oren Ambarchi is backed up by the world's greatest monster riff legends from his beloved homeland? Find out in the second volume of this infamous series where endless riffing and ecstatic shredding is the order of the day. Bonus intro track features some band from New York. Yah Boobay! Deluxe sleeve with photography by Crys Cole and Theresia Pfaender. Design by Stephen O'Malley. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
This Dazzling, Genuine "Difference" Now Where Shall It Go?
Black Truffle presents the eighth full-length release from the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi. Over the course of four LP sides, the October 2014 concert documented here ranges from rock power trio dynamics to maelstroms of analog electronics. Once again, the three demonstrate their commitment to pushing into new areas of instrumental exploration and group interaction. Where their previous releases featured extended vocal workouts from Haino, his vocalizations here ar…
Entropien I
Pan Sonic's Ilpo Väisänen, Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) and Oren Ambarchi break down to the soul of noise with a new album dedicated to Mika Vainio. If you’re into Vainio, KTL or Ilpo’s brilliant solo work under his own name or as Liima / Piiri, this one's a doozy. Collectively, die Angel model a complex physicality through raw, elemental inputs, exploring a flux of reactive feedback processes and mutating, unstructured sonic states generated from crackling fusions of electronics, drums, elec…
Hotel Record
For many, the geography defying partnership of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi is the likely source of envy and awe - a creatively rigorous adventure in sound, egged forward by the romance they share. Ambarchi needs little introduction. Over the last 20 years, he has risen as a leading light of experimental and electroacoustic practice, as recognised for his collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Sunn O))), Keith Rowe, Fire!, John Tilbury and countless others, as he is for his solo work.…
Sleepwalker's Conviction
2017 small repress. "Sleepwalker's Conviction documents a 2014 performance by Oren Ambarchi in collaboration with a 20-piece ensemble conducted by Ilan Volkov and featuring members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Speak Percussion. Foregoing the rhythmic propulsion and distortion-saturated harmonics that have featured in much of Ambarchi's recent work, the LP's single 40-minute piece inhabits a hushed, almost static space of extended tones, percussive shimmer, and creaking strings. Rat…
Tongue Tied
Oren Ambarchi and Johan Berthling are two masters of reducing music’s peak intensities to their root meaning. Oren’s early solo guitar works rendered this process with an instantly recognisable combination of sine wave throb and precisely controlled attack that has bloomed in maturity – concentrating the ecstatic potential of the guitar solo by folding it back on itself and stacking the points of greatest liminal intensity into waves of powerfully psychedelic excess while also encompassing …
I wonder if you noticed
The remarkable series of releases from the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi continues with I wonder if you noticed "I'm sorry" Is such a lovely sound It keeps things from getting worse, which presents the entirety of an 80-minute set performed at Tokyo's SuperDeluxe in March 2014. While the trio's 2012 performance was divided into two releases (BT 011LP (2014) and BT 012LP (2015)), the single extended performance presented here ranges widely over terrain both new and fam…
Aithein
**restocked** Oren Ambarchi, Stefano Pilia, and Massimo Pupillo (Zu) team up for an instrumental trip bridging post-rock, drone, and improvisation. Limited 180-gram LP in silk-screened sleeve with artwork by Sara D'Uva. Includes download code. Since the late '90s Oren Ambarchi has been exploring new ground as composer and multi-instrumentalist (mainly focusing on guitar), fusing a wide range of influences and inspiration from improvisation, contemporary music, modern electronics, and rock…
Pale Calling
**restocked** Pale Calling presents the fruits of the first collaboration between Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger and James Rushford, recorded at GRM studios, Paris in 2014. Although drawing on aspects of each member's solo works, the trio mark out their own unique territory, a mysterious space of slowly cycling electronics, distracted vocal mumbles and often unidentifiable field recordings. These two side-long pieces are composed of distinct layers that gently rise up and recede, obeying a dream-l…
Tongue
Oren Ambarchi and Johan Berthling are two masters of reducing music's peak intensities to their root meaning. Oren's early solo guitar works rendered this process with an instantly recognisable combination of sine wave throb and precisely controlled attack that has bloomed in maturity - concentrating the ecstatic potential of the guitar solo by folding it back on itself and stacking the points of greatest liminal intensity into waves of powerfully psychedelic excess while also encompassing…
Shade Themes From Kairos
"Shade Themes from Kairos is a new iteration of the dream for all the guitar freaks out there, bringing together a couple of singular players together, just to see what happens. In this case, the players were old friends and collaborators Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, playing in a space engineered and co-populated by Randall Dunn. From the top, Shade Themes from Kairos is resonant as a collective inquest in sound, with all the players deeply immersed within the panorama they are creating. …
Behold
Behold is the second collaborative release from Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke following the 2011 LP Indeed. Ambarchi and O'Rourke seamlessly blend field recordings, electronics, guitar, drums, and other acoustic instruments into a subtle combination of krautrock, minimalism, and classic free flowing electronics. Side A takes the listener into the Fourth World adventures pioneered by Jon Hassell on Fourth World Music Vol. I: Possible Musics (GB 019CD/LP), while the flip seems like an unlikel…
Live Knots
"Live Knots", Oren Ambarchi’s first release for PAN, presents two live realizations of ‘Knots’, the epic centrepiece of his Audience of One (Touch, 2012) release. Built on the interplay between Ambarchi’s swirling, guitar harmonics and the metronomic pulse and shifting accents of Joe Talia’s DeJohnette-esque drumming, the piece merges the organic push and pull of free improvisation with an overarching compositional framework.‘Tokyo Knots’ presents the complete recording of a duo performance of t…
Tea Time for Those Determined to Completely Exhaust Every Bit of
"At this point, it can justifiably be said that Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi have become one of the leading groups in experimental music. This, their sixth release, presents the entire second set of the trio's March 2013 concert at SuperDeluxe (the first set is available on Black Truffle as Only Wanting to Melt Beautifully Away Is It a Lack of Contentment That Stirs Affection for Those Things Said to Be as of Yet Unseen). While the first set of the evening saw the trio branch…
Only Wanting To Melt Beautifully Away Is It A Lack Of Contentmen
LP version. "Begun as a one-off collaboration in 2009, the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi has now become a solid working group, refining its craft through a series of annual concerts at Tokyo's legendary SuperDeluxe. Much of their recorded work has focused on their intense, ritualistic take on the rock power trio of electric guitar, bass and drums. Presenting the entire first set of the trio's March 2013 concert at SuperDeluxe (the second set will follow on Black Truffle lat…
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Live at Tusk Festival 2013
An incredible document of an incredible set - the first-time trio of Oren Ambarchi, Neil Campbell and Mick Flower was a truly transcendent thing to behold at TUSK Festival 2013. Now you can hear it on vinyl too. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia. Illustrations by Karen Constance (front) and Graeme Ross (back). "It's the clash of the improv-rock titans! Antipodean outsider guitar god Oren Ambarchi joined forces with Vibracathedralites Michael "Michael Flower" Flower and Neil "Astral Social Club" Ca…
Stacte karaoke
Two raw, ecstatic, face-melting guitar solos recorded in one take in the Ambarchi 'Stacte tradition'. This time around, Ambarchi is backed up by a badass rhythm section from Texas, and together they ride the endless riff into the goddamn sunset.
Sonja Henies Vei 31
“Sonja Henies Vei 31" is a profoundly moving document of the personal and artistic union between Crys Cole and Oren Ambarchi. Abandoning their usual instrumental artillery, both performers make themselves vulnerable to the listener, undertaking a committed exploration of pure physical gesture. Surrounding an explicitly intimate duo performance is a hazy collage of field recordings, tape hiss, metallic clinks and wandering voices. This forces the listener to hover in a disorienting psychological …
Amulet
Oren Ambarchi live recordings assembled on Cheryl Cole's iPhone at her house in Winnipeg. Not really, but it's that's how I first misread the description. Amulet actually presents two iPhone recordings assembled at Chez Cole, Winnipeg, July 2013 by the inestimable Oren Ambarchi. We've no further info but from what we can hear these are rudimentary iPhone recordings excerpted and crudely edited from a live performance (a shard of applause possibly gives the game away) between rippling, dynamicall…
The Just Reproach
The Just Reproach documents the second concert given by John Tilbury and Oren Ambarchi as a duo. When they first performed together in Reykjavik, Iceland in March 2012, the aptness of the pairing was evident. When they reprised the duo at London's Cafe OTO in September the same year in the concert presented here, the city was in the midst of a heatwave. With the air-conditioning turned off to accommodate the low volume of the performance, the uncomfortable squirming of the audience members…
Now While It's Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery
CD version. "Following on from 2012's acclaimed Imikizushi (BT 007CD/LP), Now While It's Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery is the fourth release from the established power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi, recorded in January 2012 at their yearly concert at SuperDeluxe, Tokyo. While the trio's two previous double LP releases featured sprawling, side-long performances, the music here is presented in six shorter pieces, each one displaying a different side of the tr…
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Connected
Presenting a new collaboration featuring Oren Ambarchi on guitar, the electronics of Robin Fox, and both performing on various other instruments. The music on this album came about as the result of the two being asked to co-compose the soundtrack for a new production by renowned Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move for their Connected production. 'Chunky Move's artistic director Gideon Obarzanek was drawn to the organic and deeply musical qualities of Ambarchi's work and the digital…
Cat's Squirrel
"Cat's Squirrel is a live recording of Masami Akita and Oren Ambarchi's performance in Campbelltown, Australia in May 2012. Although Akita and Ambarchi have known one another since 1993 and performed together as part of larger ensembles, this was their first performance as a duo. Together they create a massive wall of sound that moves from the cavernous to the blisteringly psychedelic, laying down shifting low-end structures over which pointillist details ricochet across the stereo field. Akita …
Seven Inches Vol. 2
Fratto9 under the sky and Kinky Gabber present the second volume of the “seven inch series”, a series of coloured 7 inches in limited and numbered edition that Luminance Ratio shares with different international artists and musicians. While the first volume of this series, released a few months ago, involved the American musician/artist Steve Roden (almost sold out now), this second volume features Luminance ratio with a psychedelic piece of music in between free-folk and ambient and the …
Wreckage
Wreckage is a collaborative work between Australian composers Oren Ambarchi and James Rushford. Cycling through a set of asymmetrical harmonic and rhythmic patterns, the composition is a study in displacement. The material, though repetitive, shifts itself in unpredictable ways to create an amorphous, and extremely delicate, sonic world. Wreckage draws upon both avant-garde and avant pop sensibilities, influenced by a variety of artists including Morton Feldman, Luciano Cilio and Luigi Non…
Raga Ooty / Nilgiri Plateau
Raga Ooty unearths three previously unreleased works (each titled with reference to the area in south India where his mother was born) from Oren Ambarchi's archive, showcasing the rawer side of his solo work between 2006 and 2011. The side-long Raga Ooty unspools a twisting, skittering thread of gritty guitar harmonics over a bed of buzzing tambura drone, creating the same paradoxical impression of simultaneous stasis and forward propulsion achieved by minimalist masters such as Henry Flynt, to …
Audience of one
Gatefold double LP version. On Audience Of One, Oren Ambarchi presents a four-part suite which moves from throbbing minimalism to expansive song-craft to ecstatic free-rock. His previous solo albums for Touch exhibited a clear progression towards augmenting and embellishing his signature bass-heavy guitar tones with fragile acoustic instrumentation. Audience Of One, while also existing in clear continuity with these recordings, opens the next chapter. Remarkable in its confidence and bread…
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Black Plume
Amongst the first generation of innovators in non-idiomatic and non-composed music, Keith Rowe has distinguished himself through his intense collaboration with younger musicians, collaborations that have engaged all involved in processes of reciprocal influence. Rowe has clearly been a teacher, or in his own words a 'permission-maker', for international groups of musicians who (especially in the last twenty years) have taken up his exploration of dislocated instrumental technique, new modes of l…
In The Mouth - A Hand
Rune Grammofon presents the third album from Swedish trio Fire! -- something of a supergroup with members from already well-known projects. And again, it's a collaboration, this time with the extraordinary and prolific guitarist Oren Ambarchi. With their heavy, hypnotic, psychedelic rock'n'jazz explorations, they have carved out a different sound than any of the groups they are normally associated with. Sax player, improviser, composer and fervent record collector Mats Gustafsson is proba…
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The Wired Lab / Wired Open Day 2009
Wired Open Day 2009 is a vinyl-only release documenting live performances by Alan Lamb, Garry Bradbury, David Burraston, Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox. Held outdoors during the evening of October 31st at The WIRED Lab, in rural South West, New South Wales, Australia, this 2LP is a document of the event; the result of an artist-in-residence program to explore the sonic possibilities of The Wires, landscape scale installations in rural NSW. The WIRED Lab is an artist-run initiative founded in 2007 t…
Imikuzushi
The next chapter for the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi, extending the power-trio strategies of their previous LP with intense music that transcends rock and electronic music. "The yearly summit of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi continues with Imikuzushi, which finds the group extending the power-trio strategies of 2011's highly-praised In A Flash Everything Comes Together As One There Is No Need For A Subject (BT 005LP) and bringing to them a newly-sustained in…
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The Mortimer Trap
The Mortimer Trap is an epic, 77-minute "variation" of Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus, constructed by German experimentalist and techno icon Thomas Brinkmann and Australian sound artist Oren Ambarchi. Pulsating waves of claustrophobic ambience generated from who-knows-what patiently builds into a throbbing, rhythmic pulse of gorgeous sonic density. Since the '80s, Thomas Brinkmann has experimented with sound, its textures and its construction methods. His custom-built two-arm turntable …
In A Flash Everything Comes Together As One
March 2011 release: phenomenal new power trio moves from a group that easily rivals Fushitsusha or Seijaku in intensity of attack. Here Haino is mostly featured on guitar and vocals with occasional forays into lapsteel (!) and air synth while O’Rourke plays bass and Ambarchi plays drums. This is some of the most squealing iconoclastic psychedelic rock of Haino’s career and his guitar playing is back at a Double Live/Hendrixoid peak, with endlessly overloaded single note guitar solos wres…