Oren Ambarchi, In The Pendulum’s Embrace (Touch)

As Alex Ferguson’s forging of an Aberdeen side good enough to beat Real Madrid in the 1983 European Cup-Winners’ Cup showed, sometimes brilliance can be achieved from the most basic of raw materials.  Oren Ambarchi’s latest release on Touch, despite its glaring lack of a prosaic defender in the Doug Rougvie mould, is a fine example of such alchemy, as it turns a load of musical lumber into a virtual arboretum of sound. 

Opening track “Fever, A Warm Poison” sets the formula, as it suspends some typically slow and deliberate guitar amongst the treetops, over a sparse mulch of extreme bottom-end tones and clicks.  You can sense a hulking physical presence lurking in the shadows, pacing backwards and forwards, before the sun breaks through the canopy midway through second track “Inamorata” – an outburst of strings, melody struggles to break free of decaying drone, before it collapses back to the forest floor as darkness regroups and floods the available space.  The tumbling flecks of guitar that cascade through the closing “Trailing Moss In Mystic Glow” are infiltrated by hints of metallic percussion, and then a wordless tribal moan – indigenous company arrives to lead you back to the edge of the clearing. 

There is less going on here than on his previous album Grapes From The Estate, but such is the craftsmanship that I feel like I’m getting a lot more satisfaction from it.  You can wander through In The Pendulum’s Embrace at your leisure by buying it from the Touch Shop.

:: :: ::