Oren Ambarchi
Grapes From The Estate

BACK FROM THE GRAVE... whose piece was this again?

Well, I haven't listened to a metal album in ages, despite having been a fan of Slayer, Pantera, Morbid Angel, etc... I have always conceived metal as a subversive form of sound, beastly and straightforward in how themes—and what themes—should be tackled... that is, viscerally, leaving the unsuspecting listener bewildered, exhausting and violating them.
Then, at some indeterminate point in time, perhaps also exasperated by the ragged grandiosity of certain "sacred monsters" and not of metal (Metallica, and Burzum, for example), I discovered that more and more often it was necessary to search in quite other areas for that aura of desecration and chorality that I wrongly saw only in metal. Today I stumbled upon this "Grapes from the estate" by a certain Oren Ambarchi.

And who the heck is he, you might ask??

Well, from the desolate lands of Australia something has been stirring for some time... trust me, dig around a bit and you'll discover a bustling undergrowth of experimental musicians and crazies who have their base camp in this faraway country: Anthony Pateras, Robin Fox, Striborg (Tasmanian black metal?!), Brothers of the Occult Sisterhood, and finally him, Oren Ambarchi.
Oren has been working and manipulating for some time with the guitar, appropriately reverberated and computer processed, in search of a skeletal and pure sound, whose circular waves, increasingly full and loaded with sound as they develop, have no other purpose than to project me and you, dear listeners, into hyperspace!

Listening to "Grapes from the estate" (preferably with headphones, with the bass at maximum, and perhaps wrapped in twilight) inevitably drags you into a dimension of self-consciousness, attentive and astonished, where the music transforms into a mutating synesthesia, as if in search of an alchemical formula to align in one's mind (and everyone's) a sort of unique and ecstatic sensation of the 5 senses, and more...
And while in the first two tracks (Corkscrew, Girl with silver eyes) this multi-level cocktail of sensations gives rise to almost glitch-like dissonances and clairvoyances, in the other two (Remedios the beauty, and especially Stars aligned/Web spun), the circularity and micropolychromy of the album's stylistic solutions are exposed in their sunny yet spectral beauty.

A hell of an album for me, who love Earth, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Brian Eno. If someone objects that this stuff is too boring, I understand... but they must understand that this stuff is purposely conceived to tire the hearing and reach a sort of reverse zenith where only one thing exists: the pure vibration.

Long live the Rose Tattoo.