You would think that a record by two Australian players-- guitarist Oren Ambarchi and turntablist Martin Ng-- would be an example of individual maximalism on par with their native country's history of easily quantified musical exports. Their pedigree involved playing in John Zorn's Cobra game few years ago, and the asinine noise of Mr. Ambarchi's early group Phlegm boasted record titles like Mr. Hoo Ha Visits the Non-Stop Pissing Circus. Ng was also half of the Mego macro-DJ duo, gcttcatt, a severe shredding and scratching of the very blocks of bit sound itself. Both men have collaborated with the likes of Phill Niblock, Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, and Phillip Jeck. You'd think Vigil would be as predictable as a bad Foster's commercial, but you couldn't be more wrong.
Their second record as a duo continues with emanations along the lines of 2001's Reconnaissance, in that each player's ego and identifiable sound is instead reduced to its most base elements, that of pure sound glow, as warm and low as tube-amp heat, alternating blue and orange radiation. "Vigil", a three-part suite of suspension, opens as a distant storm warning alarm, reaching our positions as a small drone. The sound grows naturally as slowly kindled feedback from, either guitar or record cartridge, before it's passed to and fro in a slow game of catch with a fragile plasma ball. But is it Ambarchi with metal rubbing his amplified strings or is it Ng crab-walking on a cymbal? Their telltale gestures get lost in the nebulous nature of the moment. Whose sound is whose is beyond determination: the duo radiate as one fuzzy entity, and probing into boundaries between the two is pointless. Such heady analysis into the origin of these sounds would only affect your interaction with its gentle, though resolute ripples of sound particles.
The most isolated sound event is a chime at the second part of "Vigil", and as it rings out, it becomes apparent that these men are complimentary Tibetan prayer bowls, assuaging the air itself with their rubbed metallic resonance and slowly walking through a cymbal wonderland, the sound clouds drifting past for twenty-one minutes. "When Love Comes Back to Haunt You" is more hum-mable as the closing piece, its nimbus readily discerned, a palpable form on the horizon moving ever closer.
Augmenting the release are two accompanying videos from their previous record by digital artist Tina Frank (famous for her Mego cover art). Her color bars and pixilated mists twir like holy computer smoke along with the duo's flickering embers. Only when watching these frantic explosions do you realize that this is actually the work of a trio, which explains why classification of these noises-- distinction between individual contribution-- is so difficult, and ultimately moot. But Ambarchi and Ng aren't laughing at us: the serenity they create from such small bits of chaos assures me that they'd forgive any audience its apprehension.
