ALBUM REVIEW: Oren Ambarchi – Cooked

Drag City

Oren Ambarchi is the terrifyingly prolific, wilfully peripatetic, promiscuously collaborative Australian genius who’s been at the centre of the international experimental underground for three decades now, working with everyone from Fennesz to Steve O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke to Merzbow, with fingers in every kind of musical pie imaginable, be it jazz, harsh noise, improv, ambient and more. Ambarchi, it’s fair to say, is a lot.

Cooked features two side-long pieces with a studio cast list that reads like the entire contents of a copy of The Wire (Will Guthrie! Eiko Ishibashi! Jim O’Rourke!). Hidden Tableau builds from a delicate piano trill and some alarming groaning noises that sounds like nothing so much as a demented Necks piece to a rhythm-driven workout that closes with a flurry of electronics. Sleight Of Hand begins with some filigree guitar work from Ambarchi, building slowly and carefully to include subtle drum patterns and exploratory electronics, sounding a little like Silent Way-era Miles. From the midpoint, things become a little more intense and mangled, layers of sound creating a genuinely disorientating vortex driven by a delicious, warm bass line before the whole thing gently fades away. Ambarchi never disappoints and this is a gorgeous slab of deep listening goodness.