| Format: | LP |
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For three decades Oren Ambarchi — prolific solo artist, consummate collaborator, founder of the esteemed Black Truffle — has been one of experimental music's most restlessly inventive figures. His records tend to reach outward, layering sounds, collaborators and ideas into complex shifting architectures. Prophetic Perfect Tense goes the other way entirely. Solo guitar, two sides, two single takes, minimal effects, tracked to a Telefunken 24-track machine at Studio Dede in Tokyo and produced by Randall Dunn. By his own account, the most conventionally guitar-sounding record he has ever made.
Ambarchi's discography is in large part a record of who he has played with: Jim O'Rourke and Keiji Haino, Fennesz, John Zorn, Merzbow, crys cole, and Sunn O))), where he and Dunn first worked together on Monoliths & Dimensions (2009), the record Dunn produced that remains a high-water mark for both of them.
The brief Ambarchi set was restraint. "I was determined to do something understated and single-minded," he says, "almost like a straight-up 'solo guitar' record without layers of effects and overdubs." The models were João Gilberto's 1973 white album and Alemu Aga's hushed 1995 bägänna recordings. Records that get their whole atmosphere from a player, a room, and almost nothing else.
What landed on tape is stranger and warmer. The music settles early into a loose, circling figure and stays with it, closer to blues than anything else in his catalog, "an abstracted John Lee Hooker-on-a-broken-Fender-Rhodes shuffle," as Ambarchi puts it. Detours like this are close to a working method for him: "I thrive on these in-the-moment surprises. In fact, I almost rely on them."
Dunn set up a Leslie cabinet, a Fender Twin and an Ampeg B-15 running to tape before Ambarchi sat down, and the space is audible on the record: three-dimensional, close, unmistakably a place. "I felt comfortable not having to do too much as the sound in the space was so rich." The opening is still guarded; then, "aiming for the theta state," his playing loosens and the rest unspools without visible effort.
Everything incidental was left where it fell: amp hum, fret squeaks, Leslie pedal clicks, strings scraping the table. The record's only construction is a single guitar overdub, mid-Side A and at the start and end of Side B, which Dunn talked him into after Ambarchi had called the session finished.
The result is Ambarchi about as exposed as he has ever been on record: one player, a very live room, a figure followed until it ran out. The prophetic perfect is the tense for a thing not yet done but spoken of as already finished — fitting for a record made by someone who knew exactly what he was going to do, right up until he did something else.
