Oren Ambarchi is usually described as a guitarist but before 1998's Stacte, his solo debut, he was a drummer. And if early records like Suspension or Reconnaissance, with Martin Ng, tended to fixate on liquid oscillations and eyedropper drones, recent releases are putting his rhythmic sensibility front and center. Ambarchi's 2012 album Sagittarian Domain was propelled by an elliptical funk groove that moved between krautrock and post-punk. "Knots", from 2012's Audience of One, is largely a showcase for a scorching ride-cymbal fugue played by Joe Talia, and the recently released Live Knots, featuring Tokyo and Krakow performances of the piece, is even more intensely percussive, with Talia's drumming fighting to bring order to Ambarchi's torrential feedback. And now Behold, Ambarchi's new collaboration with Jim O'Rourke, picks up the rhythmic thread of the Australian musician's recent work and finds him back behind the drums.
At first, Behold sounds like a continuation of the ideas that Ambarchi and O'Rourke set out on Indeed, their 2011 debut LP as a duo. Like its predecessor, Behold is a single piece of music separated into two side-long sections. Within its 42-minute expanse, it combines multiple methods and approaches—real-time jams, electro-acoustic collage, synthesizers and guitar feedback, ambient dub and free improv—into a shape that's at once sprawling and streamlined.
It's really anyone's guess who is doing what. At the core of the music, there's a battle between brushed metal and scratchy percussive sounds, on the one hand, and luminous tonal elements on the other. The music is aglow with streaks of feedback, molten oscillators, rubbed wineglass rims, and even the occasional struck or held note. With music this abstracted, this gradual, small gestures count for a lot, so that a single pair of bass notes, played several measures apart, come to seem like a major theme. And while there are no melodies, per se, the way filament-like phrases flare up in the murk is nevertheless lyrical. Somewhere in the mix, there's what sounds like an organ, and that Hammond-like flutter imbues the album with lively, trembling movements, even when the music is comparatively still. There are drones like the buzz of airplanes high overhead and a forest's canopy worth of synthetic birdcalls. Beneath the crystal-faceted edges of the sound, the blur runs deep and dense.
What most separates Behold from Indeed is the new album's strong sense of groove, with Ambarchi carving deep patterns with ride cymbals and hi-hats and ultra-low, chest-caving kick drums. It feels like motorik distilled to its very essence, an IV drip of pure rhythm. Like everything else on the album, the drums come and go. For most of "Behold A", there's nothing more than a hint of cymbal tapped out in rolling, quarter-note pulses; for long stretches, there's not even that. Like an underground stream returning to the surface, the rippling metal pulse returns midway through "Behold B" and gradually gathers strength, rising in concert with squalls of guitar feedback and contrapuntal piano. After a long, slow climb, it's a quick climax; the beat dies, and the remaining sounds go sailing out into the abyss, like water over a cliff. But it's the rhythm that stays with you, long after silence has settled in.
Behold is the kind of music where, depending upon the angle from which you approach it, you may perceive its overall effects in radically different ways. The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention.
