ThirtyThree ThirtyThree Records – TTTT002 161.39MB FLAC
Oglon Day is built from four musicians whose methods should, on paper, pull the music in incompatible directions. Oren Ambarchi brings guitar, bass, and oscillator; Mark Fell brings computer-generated rhythm and electronic structure; Will Guthrie brings drums and percussion; Sam Shalabi brings oud. The album divides their meeting into two long parts, but it never sounds like a polite sequence of featured contributions. The instruments enter a shared system where pulse, improvisation, repetition, and texture continually exchange roles. An oud phrase can behave like percussion, a drum pattern can become architecture, guitar can dissolve into low-frequency pressure, and the computer can sound less mechanical than the humans surrounding it.
The quartet recorded the material at Eastcote Studios in London over two days in August 2016, before performing together at the Masāfāt Festival. Joe Talia later mixed the sessions in Tokyo, and the finished album appeared in 2019 through Thirty Three Thirty Three. The recording was the quartet’s first meeting as a complete group, even though Ambarchi had already worked separately with Fell and Guthrie. That first-contact quality remains audible, but not as uncertainty. The musicians sound alert to one another from the opening moments, testing how far each element can move without breaking the larger structure. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
The first side begins with a rhythm that seems to assemble itself from several competing ideas of time. Fell’s electronics do not supply a simple grid. The pulse stutters, repeats, and shifts emphasis, creating a surface that is precise without feeling settled. Guthrie answers with acoustic detail rather than merely reinforcing the pattern. Cymbals, drum heads, and smaller percussion sounds enter around the electronic sequence, sometimes locking with it and sometimes making its regularity appear unstable. The result is neither a drummer following a machine nor a machine imitating a drummer. Both systems remain distinct while producing a third rhythmic language between them.
Shalabi’s oud gives the music its clearest melodic outline, but even that role is temporary. His phrases can sound ornate, sharp, meditative, or almost percussive depending on how they strike the surrounding rhythm. The instrument carries centuries of cultural association, yet Oglon Day does not present it as an exotic contrast to contemporary electronics. It is treated as another source of attack, resonance, repetition, and improvisational decision. Shalabi can ride the pulse, challenge it, or suspend himself above it, allowing individual notes to hang while the rhythm continues moving underneath.
Ambarchi operates near the center of the record without behaving like a conventional leader. His bass provides weight, but it does not simply anchor the group. Low tones expand and contract, creating pressure around the drums and electronics. Guitar enters as shimmer, abrasion, clipped punctuation, and sustained harmonic color. At times the strings are recognizable; elsewhere they merge with the oscillator and Fell’s computer until the source becomes impossible to separate. Ambarchi’s contribution helps bind acoustic and electronic sound, not by smoothing their differences but by occupying the unstable border between them.
The first piece develops through accumulation rather than dramatic contrast. Patterns continue long enough to become physical, then small changes begin altering their meaning. Fell may remove or fracture part of a sequence, Guthrie may shift from dense drumming to a lighter metallic circulation, or Shalabi may replace flowing phrases with short repeated figures. Nothing needs to stop completely for the music to enter another phase. The quartet redirects the existing motion, preserving momentum while changing its internal balance.
This makes Oglon Day unusually accessible without making it simple. There is always something for the body to follow: a pulse, a bass movement, a repeated oud figure, or Guthrie’s rolling percussion. Yet the music refuses the predictable rise and fall of dance production or jazz-rock improvisation. The groove is real, but it remains under examination. Every musician appears interested in how rhythm can be sustained while its center keeps moving.
The second side enters with greater looseness. The electronic framework is still present, but the spaces between events feel wider. Shalabi’s oud has more room to stretch, while Ambarchi’s guitar and oscillator produce a hovering field around it. Guthrie can move between concentrated attacks and quieter details without losing the piece’s forward motion. Fell’s computer sounds become less like a visible sequence and more like an irregular nervous system running through the ensemble.
The title offers no fixed explanation. “Oglon” does not point toward an obvious place, person, or concept, while “Day” suggests a complete cycle of changing conditions. That ambiguity fits the music. The album can feel bright and energetic, then suddenly austere, nocturnal, or disoriented without leaving its central rhythmic territory. Its two sections resemble different periods inside one extended day, connected by the same inhabitants but altered by shifts in light, temperature, and activity.
What distinguishes the quartet is the absence of decorative fusion. Oud, electronics, guitar, and drums are not placed side by side to advertise diversity. Their techniques interfere with one another. Fell’s precise digital structures make Guthrie’s acoustic timing sound more elastic. Guthrie’s drumming gives the computer patterns bodily consequence. Shalabi introduces melodic histories that resist being reduced to a loop. Ambarchi’s low frequencies and processed strings create a middle zone where every source can lose its original identity.
The mix preserves this complexity without flattening it. Percussion remains detailed even when the music becomes dense, and the oud retains its plucked edges against the electronic pulse. Low frequencies carry force without swallowing the upper register. The record can sound spacious and crowded at once, with each musician occupying a clear position while constantly bleeding into the others. Talia’s mixing allows the group’s collective form to remain audible without turning the performance into four isolated channels.
Oglon Day also avoids the usual hierarchy between composition and improvisation. Fell’s rhythmic constructions may suggest predetermined systems, while the instrumental responses feel immediate and open. Yet the computer does not represent order while the acoustic players represent freedom. Fell continually alters the system, and the others create repeated structures of their own. Composition becomes something produced in real time through attention, memory, and shared pressure.
Across its two long sides, the album creates a music that is joyful without becoming celebratory, rigorous without becoming cold, and physically forceful without relying on volume alone. The quartet discovers a temporary common language and then leaves it open rather than defining it as a new genre. Oglon Day is not electronic jazz, psychedelic oud music, improvised techno, or experimental rock, though traces of all four pass through it. It is the sound of four distinct rhythmic imaginations occupying the same room and learning, with remarkable speed, how to make one another stranger.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.