Grapes from the estate. - Oren Ambarchi (#10, 2004)

Oren Ambarchi has a pretty interesting background. Per All Music Guide, "Ambarchi was born in 1969 in Sydney, in a family of Sephardic Jews from Iraq. He spent his teenage years learning to play the drums, favoring free jazz at first." Et cetera... He does mostly ambient-ish stuff, but I was surprised that he's known mainly to use guitar. This is the only album I have, and I would have guessed keyboards of some sort (trad, synth, computer). Also, collaborating with Attila Csihar and the Sunn O))) guys was unexpected!


"Remedios the Beauty" [edit] from Grapes from the Estate (2004)

I'm only going to make one more video, because the 10-minute ambient stuff doesn't seem to get watched too much. There are only 4 long tracks, and none on Lala and YouTube before I got there.
"Remedios the Beauty" is the catchiest of the tracks, although it's repetitive enough that I didn't make another 5 minutes of Part 2.



"Girl with the Silver Eyes" from Grapes from the Estate (2004)

The first tune, "Corkscrew" eases in with a minimalist pattern of tones and hitches. It insinuates very slowly, but in a hypnotic way that seems to vaporize before you notice. Then "Girl with the Silver Eyes" continues in this vein, but heading towards the more rhythmic "Remedios." After which, the album concludes with "Stars Aligned, Web Spun," which stretches past 20 minutes. After the gradual track-by-track build, this recedes almost to Feldmania: single notes stretched to their breaking point, with minimal additions and variations. But after 20 minutes, things add up and tones are clusters and static glitches are looped in and it's a whole new thing.

Seems like Ambarchi's albums don't sound all-too-much alike, which is good. I wouldn't necessarily want a lot of records built on this template. But it's more difficult to know where to proceed, and I'm not quite inspired enough to just dive in and muck around. As much as I enjoy this one whenever I'm in a certain relaxed mood...

Genre - Electro-Acoustic Ambient
Official - orenambarchi.com/
Myspace - myspace.com/45213783
Location - Sydney, Australia

Review - Pitchfork
Download - Amazon ($3.56!), iTunes
Lala - other Ambarchi
Purchase - Amazon