Oren Ambarchi has shared an excerpt from Hidden Tableau, the first side of his new album Cooked, out September 25th via Drag City.
It begins with piano ripples from Eiko Ishibashi and then, after a few seconds, takes a hard turn: a groaning synthetic voice enters, created by Konrad Sprenger, who produced this piece and was at the helm for Shebang in 2022. What follows is a concerto of sorts for piano and ghost in the machine, the pair eventually overtaken by swarms of intricate guitar and synth arpeggios. Is that O’Rourke on synth? Impossible to say. Since Simian Angel and Shebang, Ambarchi’s guitar has been used to trigger most of what you think you’re hearing, and the guessing is part of the fun.
Cooked is two side-long pieces built the way Ambarchi has built his biggest studio records — meticulously constructed all-star jams, contributions gathered from players scattered across several countries and threaded together after the fact. The cast here runs to Joe Talia, Johan Berthling, Will Guthrie, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, Michiko Ogawa, Marcus Pal, Fredrik Rasten, James Rushford, Isak Hedtjärn, Andreas Werliin and Sprenger. What’s new is the tone. The irreverent, wayward streak that has always run beneath the hypnotic minimalism is pulled right into the centre of his highest-profile solo work.
Most of these names will be familiar to anyone who has followed his run of releases on Drag City. Reviewing Ghosted II, Thomas Blake described Shebang as defined by “flourishes of intricate, jazzy guitar”, and called the trio album that followed it “almost indecently accomplished”. By Ghosted III last August, he reckoned Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin were “unique in the world of improvised music” for pushing at experimentation in every direction at once while staying “accessible and eminently listenable”.
Ishibashi and O’Rourke, meanwhile, both turn up on Cooked off the back of Pareidolia, their layered document of a 2023 European tour, which Blake called “subtle and teasing, beautiful and sometimes bewildering”. He noted that the duo prepare their music separately and don’t discuss it before sharing it — “a dialogue between distance and closeness”. That description could stand in for Ambarchi’s whole method on this kind of album: parts arriving from everywhere, then assembled into something that sounds like a room full of people breathing the same air.
The excerpt is up now, and it moves. The foot keeps tapping while the mind boggles.
Listen/Watch to “Hidden Tableau (excerpt)”
Pre-order/Save “Cooked”, out September 25th via Drag City: https://orenambarchi.lnk.to/cooked
