Sleepwalker’s Conviction documents a 2014 performance by Oren Ambarchi in collaboration with a 20-piece ensemble conducted by Ilan Volkov and featuring members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Speak Percussion. Foregoing the rhythmic propulsion and distortion-saturated harmonics that have featured in much of Ambarchi’s recent work, the LP’s single 40-minute piece inhabits a hushed, almost static space of extended tones, percussive shimmer, and creaking strings. Rather than adopting the position of a soloist, Ambarchi allows his sub-bass guitar tones and swirling Leslie textures to blend seamlessly with the ensemble, made up of double basses, horns, and percussion. The group sound has a near-cavernous depth, as waves of low beating tones and distant percussive textures gently wash over one another, coalescing into an undulating mass. Steering clear of bombast and new music clichés, the result is a work of meditative beauty that touches on the haunted ambience of late Luigi Nono, the submerged sonics of Bryars‘s The Sinking of the Titanic, and the melancholy rituals of Christoph Heemann and Andrew Chalk‘s Mirror, while remaining unmistakably marked by the singular sensibility Ambarchi has developed over countless performances and recordings
credits
released May 11, 2015
Oren Ambarchi guitar with members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Speak Percussion.
Conducted by Ilan Volkov.
Recorded by Byron Scullin at Tectonics/Adelaide Festival,
Grainger Studio, Adelaide, March 9, 2014
Mixed by Joe Talia and Oren Ambarchi at Chinatown, Melbourne, Jan 3, 2015
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin, Jan 28, 2015
Cover image by crys cole taken at Vertigo and Moon Bar, Bangkok Nov 2014
Design by Stephen O'Malley
Oren Ambarchi is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental
approaches. His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar, "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". (The Wire, UK)....more
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supported by 8 fans who also own “Sleepwalker's Conviction”
Discovered as a rec from our Drowned In Sound message board thread and what a find! Brilliantly dense, making so much out of seemingly so few variations. Amazing stuff! bennyhana22