“To a man with a hammer,” goes the old saying, “everything is a nail.” Such is the case with Australian avant garde drummer Oren Ambarchi, who in a moment of serendipity laid eyes on an electric guitar and, well let him tell it: “There happened to be one laying around in our rehearsal room. I picked it up and starting hitting it with drumsticks and using it in whatever way I wanted to use it in, and one thing led to another. I’m glad I wasn’t trained… I never wanted to learn to play it properly, it was an object as much as an instrument.”
Ambarchi is a musical gadfly with a preference for a good, steady metronomic groove who’s played with just about everybody who’s anybody in the avant/noise rock world, including Sunn O)))—he’s appeared on several albums and played with them live. He’s engaged in projects with its individual members as well, in the bands Burial Chamber and Gravetemple. He’s also collaborated with the equally eclectic Jim O’Rourke, who was a member of Sonic Youth between 1999 and 2005, composer/musician Chris Townend, Warm Ghost’s Paul Duncan, composer Alvin Lucier, and enough other musical pioneers to populate New York City’s Lower East Side. Just take a gander at his discography and start counting. Ambarchi is one busy guy.
Ordinarily such rarified bona fides would mean as little to me as his highfalutin’ goal of “re-routing the instrument into a zone of alien abstraction where it’s no longer easily identifiable as itself. Instead, it’s a laboratory for extended sonic investigation.” Believe me, I’d be much more impressed if he were to collaborate with Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy Mangrum. And I’d have never even heard of him had I not been sitting in my brother’s minivan when he turned on Ambarchi’s 2012 LP Sagittarian Domain.
Now my brother is a world-class jazz expert who owns like 80,000 jazz albums and whose breadth of knowledge is such that he can actually put a date to the pamphlet—and I’m not making this up—that legendary bassist Charles Mingus wrote on teaching your cat to use the toilet. So I’m used to hearing his latest enthusiasms, and just as used to liking them while rarely feeling the need to listen to them again.
But when he turned on Sagittarian Domain I perked up and said, “This is Krautrock!” And that’s exactly what it sounds like. Ambarchi is no noise rocker or free jazz fireworks guy—what he does, and I’ve listened to enough of his other recordings (2022’s Shebang is great, as is 2015’s Live Knots, which my bro describes as “so Krauty it’s almost goosestepping”) to know he does it consistently—is establish a steady, mid-tempo drum beat, throw some very idiosyncratic (but once again anything but raucous) guitar over it, then very slowly give the song the slow build, adding more uniquely textured guitar or subtly varying the beat or doing whatever else he sees fit until it reaches a swelling peak, only to subside again.
He doesn’t employ the classic 4/4 motorik beat employed by Kraftwerk, Neu!, or (occasionally) Can, but the groove is every bit as engine-driven and trance-inducing. And most of his songs are in it for the long haul—the title (and only) track on Sagittarian Domain goes on for thirty-three plus minutes, giving you sufficient time to completely lose yourself in the zone of the drone. It’s meditative music, in a sense, but rhythmically supercharged—a movable trace you won’t be able to sit cross-legged to. Or play on the down low for that matter. Like Neu!’s “Hallogallo” or Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” it makes for perfect listening while cruising (as I know from experience) from Wilmington to Newark.
Sagittarian Domain—on which Ambarchi plays everything but the stringed instruments that take the song out—opens with a repetitive and very limited and simple pattern of guitar notes. He then adds some drawn-out guitar feedback and a Moog bass synthesizer, and follows that with a pulsating but more or less unvarying drum beat and cymbals. And away we go, for Saturn or Munich or maybe the in-laws house for brunch. And it goes on like that, drawing you into its subtly mutating groove until your cognitive functions cease and you become the song.
And the tiniest variations make a huge difference—sometime around the ten-minute mark his static guitar click pattern becomes more prominent and urgent, and it sounds revolutionary, as does the ever-increasing volume and intensity of the big guitar wash. And the music grows ever more intense—I reject Ambarchi’s use of the word “laboratory” because there’s nothing clinically cold about this impassioned music, which sure as hell didn’t come out of a test tube—until you think the song’s going to go on forever, unto infinity, building and building, when everything falls away but that throbbing drum beat, and you’re back where you began. Then the drum beat changes just a smidgeon and the slow build, the drone and the drama, begin all over again until a viola, violin and cello come in, adding even more texture, and the drum beat stops, and what you’re left with are the strings playing a solemn refrain, an elegy to the song as it were. And that’s it.
My faltering description doesn’t do the song justice—you have to hear with your own ears what he does with his guitar in that “zone of alien abstraction” he speaks of. And to be honest I reject that phrase—what I hear isn’t “alien abstraction” but all too human, the lovely bloom and swell of the human heart. This music is anything but cold and abstract—it’s a sort of love song and celebration of our longing to climb forever onwards and upwards towards a soul state that can only be described as spiritual.
Oren Ambarchi’s sprawling body of work gives Krautrock fans a whole new world to explore—it’s like discovering Can all over again. And how great a gift is that? Sagittarian Domain is as propulsive as it is mesmerizing, and a miracle of slow-building excitement that will leave you both hypnotized and enthralled. If your list of favorite things includes Neu!’s “Hallogallo” or Can’s “Mother Sky,” or in a very different sense John Coltrane’s songs of spiritual yearning, you absolutely owe it to yourself to give Sagittarian Domain a spin. It’s that good.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
