Wildly expanding the celebrated creative territories that defined 2022’s ‘Shebang’, Oren Ambarchi delivers ‘Cooked’, joined by an all-star cast of collaborators: Joe Talia, Johan Berthling, Will Guthrie, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, Michiko Ogawa, Marcus Pal, Fredrik Rasten, James Rushford, Isak Hedtjärn, Andreas Werliin, and Konrad Sprenger. Unclassifiable, unpredictable, and absolutely visionary - fusing jazz, prog, free improvisation, and electroacoustic experimentalism - it’s nothing short of a towering landmark in Ambarchi’s already remarkable career.

Since his appearance on the Australian scene during the mid-1980s and subsequent emergence onto the global stage during the following decade, Oren Ambarchi has remained a shape-shifting innovator, weaving guitar lines that often sound like anything but, across numerous idioms of experimental sound. Thrillingly, with Ambarchi, you never quite know what you’re going to get, but you know it’s going to be great. Both in his creative practice - endlessly pushing, and exploring the unknown - and in the way he navigates the context - seeking collaboration, conversation, and community, and supporting the latter through his seminal imprint Black Truffle - he is emblematic of what experimental music is truly all about. His latest, ‘Cooked’, issued by Drag City, is a perfect distillation of the singular world that he has built over the years. Drawing in an astounding cast of collaborators rooted in enduring friendship and mutual respect, ‘Cooked’ cultivates the sonic territories that first appeared on Ambarchi’s critically celebrated 2022 LP ‘Shebang’, pushing them into even wilder and more unpredictable zones. Comprising two side-long tracks that ebb and flow through a vast range of references - golden era ECM jazz, heady fusion, free improvisation, prog, electroacoustic experimentalism, and a great deal more - fused by a highly personal sensibility that sounds like nothing else, ‘Cooked’ is an astounding accomplishment, marking a new high-water mark in Ambarchi’s towering career.

Born in 1969, Oren Ambarchi entered the musical fray as a free jazz drummer in Sydney, Australia, during the mid-1980s, before shifting his focus to guitar sometime around the outset of the 1990s. Regarding what would become his primary vehicle for creative expression as an “object as much as an instrument”, over the coming decade Ambarchi’s intense creative curiosity, melding guitar wizardry with electric interventions and processing, would place him at the forefront of experimental music, traversing the globe, by the end of the decade, sealing his now legendary status with seminal, groundbreaking full-lengths like ‘Insulation’, ‘Grapes From The Estate’, and the multi-part 'Stacte’ series. While, over the last 25 or so years, Ambarchi’s position as a solo artist has carved its way through our consciousness, jointly billed collaborations with friends and peers like Jim O'Rourke, Keith Rowe, Keiji Haino, Johan Berthling, Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide, Chris Abrahams, Robbie Avenaim, Günter Müller, Crys Cole, and numerous others, have come to represent an equally important aspect of his practice and output, alongside his work in ensembles like Ghosted, Burial Chamber Trio, The Ever Present Orchestra, Pentemple, Gravetemple etc. More recently, members of this remarkable cast have been enlisted to contribute their voices to Ambarchi’s ambitious solo efforts, bringing the entire spectrum of his efforts under one heading, as in the case of 2022’s ‘Shebang’, and now with ‘Cooked’, which encounters many of the same members of his community helping to sculpt its wilder dimensions of sonic construction.

While very much an Ambarchi outing - it’s hard to imagine anyone else making anything quite like it - the ensemble behind ‘Cooked’ is about as all-star as it gets, incorporating the singular practices of Joe Talia, Johan Berthling, Will Guthrie, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, Michiko Ogawa, Marcus Pal, Fredrik Rasten, James Rushford, Isak Hedtjärn, Andreas Werliin, and Konrad Sprenger across its two side long works - ‘Hidden Tableau’ and ‘Sleight Of Hand’ - in distinct configurations. Much like ‘Shebang’ before it, it entirely defies standard notions of categorization. The moment you think you know what it is, it morphs into something else, and even then it’s hard to nail down. The first track, ‘Hidden Tableau’, features a sextet of Ambarchi on guitars and other unnamed instruments, Berthling on double bass, Ishibashi on piano, O'Rourke on synths, Talia on drums, and Konrad Sprenger contributing vocal synthesis, electronics & production. Easing into the flow with disarmingly elegant piano lines and multi-instrumental textures - sculpting an eerie flirtation with ambient music - around the 8 minute mark things begin to go fully haywire with the introduction of warped vocal interventions by Sprenger, before picking up the pace and introducing a groove that is roughly aligned with Ambarchi and Berthling’s work in Ghosted. However, in true maverick Ambarchi fashion, this chugging sense of calm doesn’t last long, as the ensemble bubbles and percolates, introducing complex tonal combinations and elastic polyrhythms, developing a sprawling sense of space that feels a bit like ‘Bitches Brew’ era Miles on ketamine.

The second side roughly builds on the thrilling hybrid of fusion jazz and warped prog virtuosity that developed across the length of its predecessor, beginning with crisp, singing guitar lines, building a meticulous web onto which the ensemble of Ambarchi; Berthling again on double bass; Guthrie on gamelan and drums; Hedtjärn’s whistling; Ogawa on shō; Pal’s synthetic sounds; Rasten on guitar; Rushford on celeste, piano, and portative organ, and Werliin on drums, weave a tonally dense primordial soup. Moving through passages of spectral percolations of ambience, the drums and bass gather pace to deliver a minimalist pulse into the heart of ‘Sleight Of Hand’, giving the other members free rein to stretch out for the piece’s middle section, that borders on free jazz, before reining it in with some gentle moments of electroacoustic elegance, before finishing with a bang.

In its totality, what Ambarchi has achieved with ‘Cooked’ is profoundly ambitious: a weird, wonderful, and visionary body of sonic expression that doubles as a love letter to music making itself: the act, its long and diverse history, and the many collaborators with whom he works. Languid and tense, every moment is imbued with an exacting attention to detail, culminating as an entirely singular record that pushes into territories that few ever have.