Oren Ambarchi – Audience of One
Oren Ambarchi’s entry at Discogs lists 32 albums. The majority of them explore the ideas of drone, minimalistic guitar and bass sounds. His latest release “Audience of One” goes a different route. Compared with the usual hovering single notes stretched out on a dark surface, this album feels like a foray into more song oriented experiments.
“Salt” – the starter of “Audience of One” is a bitter-sweet duo-harmonic vocal track with sparse piano accompaniment and distant string sounds. This was so different, from what I was expecting that I needed to double check, if I really was listening to Oren Ambarchi. And although this is a great and moving listen, the harmonization of the vocals could be a little more elaborated. There is nothing wrong with them; the melody and the progression are both beautiful, but it feels that they are not fully exploring the possibilities that seem to be buried somewhere in this piece. This is probably the weakest track of the album.
“Knots”, a 32 minute long recording, is the center piece of “Audience of One”. Starting off with a tuplet driven jazz cymbal, airy feedback textures and the Ambarchi trademark bass sound with its muffled thump, it develops more and more into a noisy clash of sound, before it looses itself into washes of distortion and off-kilter drum patterns. This tour de force ends up in faint feedbacks, distorted spring reverb bass smacks that have a strange rubbery quality. This track is probably closest to the material, one is used to hear from Ambarchi, but still offers a lot of new approaches, ideas and perspectives to fill whole albums with it.
“Passage” opens with lonely piano chords and a high frequency field-recording that sounds like scratchy contact microphones or people walking in the snow. The track stays in this very hushed state with its distant voices shimmering in the background, airy Hammond organ drones and Eyvind Kang’s violin flickering like a far away beacon in this mist. Especially after the throbbing end of “Knots” this has a meditative, lucid quality that hovers on the edge of mid 80s new age records, before it seamlessly fades into the last piece of the album.
“Fractured Mirror” is an adaption of the 1978 hard rock piece by Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley. Together with Natasha Rose, Ambarchi turns this into a meandering Takoma school meditation. The quietly pulsing drum computer does sound a little too cheesy at the beginning but does the job quite well and ties the overlapping guitar lines together. Although the track is really close to the original, it is amazing to see how Ambarchi and Natasha Rose unveil the depths of this “simple” hard rock song that sounds so straight forward on a first and quick listen.
The various directions “Audience of One” takes and the slight differences from the regular Oren Ambarchi releases, makes this album a great listen. The combination of sounding catchy – even poppy at times – but yet still manage to keep an “experimental edge” is an interesting and rewarding approach.
