oren ambarchi - sagittarian domain (album preview)

*Excerpts from the album. Now available at Experimedia.net.* Massive new missive from the always intriguing Oren Ambarchi, arriving in the form of an epic 34-minute composition for guitar, Moog, drums, voice (all handled by Ambarchi) and strings. "Sagittarian Domain" is unique in Ambarchi's canon as it features driving bass and kraut-oriented percussion most prominently, while allowing his trademark guitar processing and atmospherics to take on more of a supporting role. The percussion builds to a frenzied squall, recalling Faust or Can at their most focused and unhinged. This is a BIG record, sort of reminding me of Steven R. Smith's recent Ulaan Kohl material in its single-minded approach to psych-oriented excess. Blistering and beautiful stuff here. - Alex Cobb, Experimedia
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LP version. "For anyone who still associates Oren Ambarchi exclusively with the clipped, bass-heavy tones of solo electric guitar works such as Suspension (TO 033.18CD), this rhythmically churning one-man-band monster of an album-length piece might seem to come out of nowhere. However, listeners who have followed the breadth of his work for the last few years (solo and in projects with collaborators from Jim O'Rourke to Stephen O'Malley and Keith Rowe to Keiji Haino) will have noted how Ambarchi has allowed increasingly clear traces of his enthusiasms as a music listener (for classic rock, minimal techno and '70s fusion, among other areas) to surface in his performances and recordings, all the time filtering them through his signature long-form structures and psychoacoustic sonics. Recorded in a single inspired studio session, Sagittarian Domain displaces Ambarchi's trademark guitar sound from the center of the mix, its presence felt only as an occasional ghostly, reverberated shimmer. Endlessly pulsating guitar and bass lines sit alongside electronic percussion and thundering motorik drumming (familiar from his work with Keiji Haino) at the core of the piece, locking into a voodoo groove, like Faust covering a '70s cop show theme. The work is founded on hypnotic almost-repetition, the accents of the drum hits and interlocking bass and guitar lines shifting almost imperceptibly back and forwards over the beat as they undergo gradual transformations of timbre. Cut-up and phase-shifted strings enter around the half-way mark like an abstracted memory of the Eastern-tinged fusion of the Mahavishnu Orchestra's classic Visions of the Emerald Beyond, before returning for an extended, stark yet affecting come-down coda, equal parts Gavin Bryars and Purple Rain. While Sagittarian Domain contains traces of a diversity of influences, it mines all of them to uncover something that is clearly an extension of Ambarchi's own investigations up to this point, exhibiting the same care for micro-detail and surrender to the physicality of sound that are present in all of his work, extending them in new ways to repetition, pulse and rhythm." --Francis Plagne; Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, June 2012.