Editions Mego – EMEGO 264
Eminent avant-garde/experimental explorer Oren Ambarchi opens a new
avenue to embrace the warmth and mystic psychedelia of Brazilian music
with assistance from celebrated percussionist Cyro Baptista.
Arriving just after Ambarchi’s 50th birthday, and Black Truffle's 10th,
‘Simian Angel’ sees him yoke back from the forward tilt of his
rhythm-driven outings over the past decade in order to focus on his
electric guitar playing, and with utterly sublime results. Keening
sideways to the unyielding percussion of ‘Hubris’ [2016], he divines a
floating space that recalls the beautifully pensile cats cradle of his
early classic ‘Grapes From The Estate’ [2004], only this time his tone
and arrangements are fleshlier, almost even maximalist in relief of what
came before.
The first half’s ’Palm Sugar Candy’ is pure star-gazing material, with
Baptista’s hand-played, self-built percussion drawing us horizontal
while Ambarchi’s glowing notes gently colour the sky, gradually opening a
glorious space between their dissonant, murmuring glisten and an
awning, harmonic meridian, where Ambarchi (or some uncredited voice)
whispers and scats into the space, gently recalibrating our depth
perception and emphasising a sublime tension between sanguine stasis and
a rhythmic cool breeze which sends leaves rustling, seeming to turn his
guitar into a MIDI-triggering aeolian harp in the piece’s spellbinding,
levitating 2nd half.
’Simian Angel’ follows with a more gripping rhythmic pull from the
twanging Berimbau, just one of myriad percussion mastered by Baptista
(who has previously played with everyone from John Zorn to Derek Bailey
and Robert Palmer), before Ambarchi glydes into view like a chorus of
the titular, sighing Simian Angels, drawing the piece upwards into
thinner air, where guitar melts into piano and columns of warm air carry
distant vocals from below. The drums rejoin to mark the work’s final
avian swoops in strokes and dashes of Ambarchi’s guitar, triggering MIDI
keys in a beautifully colourful sort of jazz fusion call and response,
apparently located amid and above a subtropical canopy.
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