Oren Ambarchi

by François Couture
Hailing from Sydney, Australia, Oren Ambarchi started as a free jazz drummer, went through a Japanoise phase, and ended up cutting himself a place under the avant-garde sun as a lowercase guitarist in the early 2000s, pushing his instrument into territories similar to the ones explored by contemporaries Rafael Toral and Kevin Drumm. His releases on Tzadik, Touch, and Staubgold attracted international interest, but he remained in his home country, working hard at developing a local scene with his What Is Music? festival.
 
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. Listening to John and Alice Coltrane and other spiritual jazz allowed for his Jewish roots to catch on to him. He went to New York to study at an orthodox Jewish school in Brooklyn, immersing himself in mysticism by day and experimental music by night. The music of composers Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier, the avant-garde jazz of John Zorn, and the noise of Keiji Haino prompted him to pick up a guitar and find something to do with it. The first answer was noise. Back in Australia, and strongly influenced by the Japanoise scene, he put together the noise/punk group Phlegm with drummer Robbie Avenaim, and later the Sisters of Menstruation. All the while he got an invitation from John Zorn, whom he had met while in New York, to perform at the 1993 Radical Jewish Culture Festival with the likes of Fred Frith and Ikue Mori — Ambarchi would eventually record a duo CD with Robbie Avenaim, The Alter Rebbes Nigun, in 1999, for Zorns label Tzadik. Australia quickly reclaimed Ambarchi as he was more prone to trying to develop something back home. With Avenaim, he organized the event What Is Music? in 1994, which quickly turned into an annual festival. This activity helped the guitarist develop contacts with the local free improv scene (Jim Denley, Stevie Wishart, Martin Ng, etc.), along with international artists.
 
The guitarist only began his solo career proper in 1998. As occasions to perform live were becoming rare, he found himself with more time on his hands. Influenced by both the burgeoning Austrian/German scene of digital audio (Mego, Touch, Staubgold) and his love for the music of Feldman and Lucier, Ambarchi retreated into calmer, more meditative, and textural sounds. He recorded his first solo LP, Stacte (Jerker Productions, 1998), at home in one take without looking back. That, and Stacte.2 (1999), attracted the attention of the British experimental electro label Touch for whom he subsequently recorded Insulation (2000) and Suspension (2001), both beautiful examples of his new approach. Around the same time, Ambarchi began teaching improvisation at the University of Western Sydney. He made his first European tour in the summer of 2001.