Oren Ambarchi
Two decades with Oren Ambarchi plus Black Truffle, Ray's Egg Cream, Asparagus, Olivia Block, Metamucil-stopheles, and Keiji Haino
At the turn of the 21st century, I moved from Austin to New York City. Did I think I’d still be clinging to such cement twenty years later? Not at all. When I left Texas, I had been writing for my roommate’s homemade magazine which gave me the still crazy notion to reach out to complete strangers and start prying into them and asking what makes them tick. That magazine never made it to another print issue, so these inaugural correspondences wound up elsewhere.
One was with Chicago noise musician Kevin Drumm. which wound up running at Pitchfork. The second was with another Chicago musician/ composer, Olivia Block. Our email chat touching on Texas band life, bat caves, and compositional methods wound up over at Perfect Sound Forever.
The third became a long-running email exchange with Oren Ambarchi. How I plucked the Australian guitarist’s thin card case out of a stack of promo CDs I’ll never know, but Insulation intrigued me. We bantered back and forth over email for months, a correspondence that didn’t survive a laptop upgrade. About the only thing I remember of it is that he hepped me to one of my favorite albums of all-time.
Mere weeks after my arrival in NYC in the summer of 2001, I apologized for the lag in correspondence and said I had just moved here. He said he would also be in NYC and could he stay with me for a few weeks? I’m sure my complete stranger roommates didn’t mind another total stranger from Australia crashing in our living room for an entire month in the summer. (You can read my ignorant South Texas self asking him what he was doing with the Tefillin in our living room every morning in the subsequent Perfect Sound Forever interview. And behind the paywall are quotes from another archival interview with Ambarchi from the long-defunct Wondering Sound website.)
Ambarchi had been a yeshiva student in the city back in the 1990s, going to John Zorn improv nights on the side. So while he was technically my guest, he actually became my guide to the quickly vanishing NYC. By some small miracle in this post-9/11, post-Bloomberg city, two memorable delicacies he turned me onto –the beef borscht at Veselka and the egg cream at Ray’s– remain available to order in 2024. As he told me then, Zorn himself insists its the lone place in Manhattan to have a proper egg cream. But only if Ray himself stirs the spoon.
Every bit as wonderful is that Ambarchi’s music has fearlessly expanded and matured, remaining vital some two decades on. By my ears, he has released more than a handful of crucial albums along the way, right up to his most recent project, a trio with the Swedish rhythm section of bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin for this week’s new release, Ghosted II. As profound as his solo work can be, his work in collaboration is just as worthy.
I recall during the early ‘00s thinking that the sludge metal made by the cloaked duo Sunn O))) might be a schtick (in one review I quipped their sound as “Metamucil-stopheles” for that brand of bowel-quaking metal frequencies). But at some point, Ambarchi was brought into their ranks and I soon realized my error of judgment. Make it through the billowing smoke and shadowy robes and their music revealed its stamina and profundity. One particular Sunn O))) show at Brooklyn Masonic Temple with Oren and Attila Csihar would easily make it to my “greatest live concerts experienced” shortlist.
Were that not enough, in 2009, Ambarchi started his Black Truffle imprint, which became an outlet for his myriad projects, a bevy of emerging artists, and totally crucial reissues. He quickly hit one hundred with 2023’s archival reissue of Tonic 19-01-2001, a live concert at Tonic with Tony Conrad, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Jim O’Rourke. Black Truffle shows little sign of slowing down, as this year alone has seen releases of unreleased North Indian vocal ragas, ecstatic Swedish Afro-fusion, and Richard Teitelbaum’s criminally-unissued electronic soundtrack to Suzan Pitt’s experimental animated film, Asparagus.
(In the early days of fatherhood, I came across Pitt’s film on Criterion and –in a decision no doubt fueled by a delirious lack of sleep– thought “oh cool, it’s animated!” and watched it with my daughter. Eeep! Thankfully, she delighted at the poo jokes in the film and I wasn’t hauled off for neglect. )
Black Truffle’s latest release is The Mountains Pass, a new album from none other than Olivia Block. Nearly twenty years after sending cold emails from South Texas to Ambarchi in Australia and Block in Chicago and asking them to chat, it was a thrill to see them in collaboration on her latest work. It finds Block boldly pushing herself and her sound into thrilling new terrain. I was completely struck by the sound of her own voice appearing here. “The Hermit’s Peak” is the centerpiece, a steady build of piano, percussion, and electronics that blossoms into what might be Block’s approximation of a sprawling ECM date.
A few more recommendations of Oren’s albums, with quotes from that interview now lost to the internet (not to mention a quote about Keiji Haino and the act of thought that I constantly return to) and some Black Truffle selections after the jump…
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