It might seem strange to toss the word "patience" around when discussing the work of Oren Ambarchi, especially considering the rapidity with which he released recorded music in 2012. But there's an unflappable air about the Australian musician, a sense that he's carving a serene path through all the chaos. Ambarchi has reached an enviable point, where he can indulge wildly creative urges and find multiple outlets willing to put them out into the world. Connected is the latest of those, a five-track album released with fellow Australian musician and artist Robin Fox, with Kranky the lucky recipients of their work. The title is taken from a work by dance company Chunky Move, whose artistic director Gideon Obarzanek asked the pair to co-compose the soundtrack. It's all slow-build wordless mantras, sometimes ascending to crisp peaks, at other times locked down in a sense of permanent anticipation. Traits like "haste" and "urgency" have been firmly smudged out of the frame.
It's to Ambarchi and Fox's credit that there's no sense of these pieces serving another purpose, achieving the often strived for (but rarely achieved) ideal of dual-purpose soundtrack work that's equally strong when stripped of the work it purports to support. On Connected it's often difficult to see how a dance troupe would find a way to pull movement from such static grooves, a feeling supported by the sheer strength and vision of the music. Simply put, this feels like a world unto itself, crashing from lightly strung krautrock into ear-piercing digital glitch. It's hard to envision another layer on top of it all provided by Obarzanek's dancers, just as it's tough to imagine the Fall's I Am Kurious Oranj being used by Michael Clark as a ballet score. Sometimes soundtracks work better without any visual stimulus-- it's better to succumb to the sheet-of-ice electronics of "Invigilation" from Connected instead of struggling to see how it ties in with another artform.
The colossal nine-minute opener "Standing Mandala" was used to preview this album, and it's a track that leaves much of the rest of the material cowering in its wake. It's an extension of Ambarchi's work on this year's Sagittarian Domain, which took a similarly poised approach to repetition. There's always a creeping sense that it might be heading somewhere, perhaps a swollen torrent of distortion hidden around the corner, or a wrong-footed chord change looming on the horizon. Those things never arrive. Instead, the song is cut abruptly just when it feels like it might be reaching some kind of climax. Ambarchi and Fox clearly aren’t interested in "destination." This is music that's all journey, no resolution. "Game of Two" circles in place in a similar way to Neil Young's Dead Man score, where distended guitar chords are simply allowed to be. The lack of forward momentum makes everything feel suspended in time, hanging in infinite space.
Repetition is the pivot around which Connected turns, although it's the only stylistic keepsake Fox and Ambarchi clutch onto throughout the record. They shift through moods with each successive track, taking in morose ambient textures on the title track and penetrative electronic noise on "Trios". The latter generates a feeling akin to having shards of glass stuffed into your ears, so high are the frequencies. At times it feels like the track is going to implode as the pair steadily layers on great piles of malfunctioning electronics, ultimately returning to the trick they pulled off on "Standing Mandala" by simply cutting everything dead when they reach peak intensity. It's as though Ambarchi and Fox caught themselves going somewhere and had to stop short, retaining their sense of composure by pulling the listener back to a feeling of stasis. Connected is far from being the first record to make a virtue out of spinning in place, but there's a discipline and control here that's rarely heard, a feeling of two musicians utterly dominating their craft.
