It's a strange kind of fate that has caused Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi to spend most of his career making records that demonstrated his singular guitar sound, only to gain greater notice for an album that barely shows it off at all. But that's the way Audience of One, released by his longtime label Touch, is panning out. Ambarchi is also known for his collaborative work with Sunn O))), with whom he's recorded and played live, complementing his extensive solo releases and further alliances with musicians including Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Christian Fennesz. Other guests emerge on Audience of One's four pieces. Among them are impressive contributions from Warm Ghost's Paul Duncan, providing vocals on the opening "Salt"; and Eyvind Kang, filling out a chamber arrangement on the expansive "Knots".
There's a sense of new life forming, of Ambarchi's re-contextualizing his place in the world. His music has taken in vast stylistic shifts in the past, but here he forges deeper into the unknown, loosening control over his work to allow his collaborators to leave a more indelible footprint and pushing many of the shapes he forms into a tighter framework. Those shapes on the opening "Salt" mirror the glass-like ambience of Markus Popp's Oval, sifting a stilled beauty into the track as Duncan's keening vocal echoes softly over them. When a hushed swell of strings momentarily enters the frame it scrapes close to the kind of work Jason Pierce was experimenting with circa Pure Phase, where a chilly tone-drift provides a simple backdrop for raw, unhampered emotion.
That may be a surprising comparison for longstanding fans of Ambarchi's work, but on Audience of One he's clearly happy to buck a few expectations. On the 33-minute centerpiece "Knots", there's a greater widening of his vision, bringing in the pitter-patter of drummer Joe Talia's metronomic ride-cymbal playing, initially counterbalanced by shards of abstract noise, ranging from barely extant slivers of sound to a blackened, all-encompassing bedlam. It's strung up in an unusual space, full of gaps for the musicians to move around in but also striding forward with purpose and goal, ricocheting back and forth between the known and the unknown. It's reminiscent of Thomas Fehlmann's work with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on "DFM", where all the players are intuitively aware of how to expand into spaces without overwhelming the track's fragile fabric.
"Knots" is intricate and fascinating, the kind of piece that's impossible to digest in one or two hearings, always holding back secrets to reveal on further plays. There's a lightness and a density to it, with Ambarchi's black-hole soloing at the midway point falling back into near-quiet in the final third before a series of forceful, metallic clangs push and pull it to a barbed close. The only way out after that is to return to the buttoned-up euphoria of what came before, with singer Jessika Kenney cooing over "Passage" while Ambarchi caresses out ambient noise by kneading the rims of a series of wine glasses. It's a necessary climb-down from "Knots", an escape hatch that stops the mind from reeling on what came before.
To complete the picture, and to continue the strain of reinvention that runs throughout Audience of One, the album closes with a cover of Ace Frehley's "Fractured Mirror". It's a marginal lift in tone after "Passage", with the plush march of a drum machine providing a steady pulse for glass-cut guitar playing to echo around. In 2004, Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy reviewed Ambarchi's Grapes from the Estate, wondering what the guitarist could do with Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher". "Fractured Mirror" may be the closest we get to an answer, with the overabundant guitar playing of Frehley's version sucked out and replaced with a downplayed beauty that's just about perceptible if you listen closely to the original. But that's typical of Ambarchi's approach on Audience of One, which feels like he's listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward, causing him to quietly cleanse his vision in ever more compelling ways.
