Australian-born, Berlin-based psychic expeditionary, Oren Ambarchi, is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, entombed in a mirror ball. He’s been a doyen of the international underground for over 20 years, amassing a back catalogue that’s reached triple figures. Although he’s primarily associated with the kind of esoteric reordering of the guitar that has attracted collaborators as formidable as Keiji Haino and Sunn O))), his last two releases have been with indie darlings Drag City. But that hasn’t blunted his sonic scalpel.
Shebang – his 2022 Drag City debut – was an eclectic collision of pointillistic solo guitar and Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis space jams. With Cooked he’s gone further through the looking glass, creating two side-length pieces of mysterious beauty.
The first thing to notice about both his Drag City statements is the artwork. They’re garish to the point of queasiness. Shebang featured a vivisected birthday cake with layers of rainbow-toned food colouring, adorned by a solitary candle – the clinical superficiality of the image has an almost pornographic sheen. The same can be said of Cooked (Cooked = cuck’d?), with its Jeff Koons-esque sequined creature with narcotic eyes and confected colours. Both say something about the imperishable banality of pop culture, but the ingredients in Cooked are much more rarified.
Eiko Ishibashi’s repeated piano refrain runs through the opening track Hidden Tableau like an unanswered question. It has a suspended, arachnid quality which brings to mind minimalist ivory ticklers Morton Feldman and John Tilbury, with their emphasis on interventions which are inconsequential to the other musical events around them. Glacial drones and spartan drums coalesce around Konrad Sprenger’s primal utterances, which sound like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s experiments in sub-vocal speech. The overall effect is not as forbidding as I might be making it sound. It has a nocturnal blues flavour with instruments orbiting each other with the subtlety and poise of planetary systems. Ambarchi’s guitar shimmers and dissolves in pools of moonlight until Joe Talia’s drums propel the whole piece into the kind of kinetic, abstract jazz of Herbie Hancock’s Sextant album – with futuristic bleeps and squiggles ricocheting around hivemind group improvisation.
The second piece, Sleight of Hand, demonstrates Ambarchi’s virtuosity as a guitarist. His patterns overflow with tendril-like exploration, which are interwoven with James Rushford’s interstellar organ to form pleasingly distorted geometries. This piece is more linear than Hidden Tableau, which could be attributed to Johan Berthling’s double bass, which acts as a binding agent for some gnarly soloing. Not least from Marcus Pal, whose polyglottal shredding would have Terry Riley sprinting for the Tascam and bong.
This is ensemble improvisation at its most accomplished with an international cast of master abstractors. In Drag City, Ambarchi has found a larger platform to bring his mutant blues to the masses. This is a public service which should be applauded because, 100-plus releases in, he’s rarely sounded better.
Cooked (September 25th, 2026) Drag City
Order/Save “Cooked”: https://orenambarchi.lnk.to/cooked