Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie — Cold Shoulder

Organ drones and drums. The ingredients are well-established, but their specific movement through sonic space, autopoietic and generous, is anything but on Cold Shoulder by long-time collaborators and experimentalists, Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie. That the two performers are familiar with one another is immediately apparent and animates a constantly evolving organic core of the album’s two, side-length pieces, originally recorded live in Berlin in 2024 (the immediacy of the performance is similarly evident). Oh, and the shifting movement of what sounds like the Leslie speaker of a Hammond organ? Well, it’s really Ambarchi’s guitar, called upon to push back the listening environment until there is finally space for Guthrie’s drums to emerge — naked and unmasked.

The dialogic or contrapuntal form of duelling musicians is finally gets an update to lend a voice to the process of tonal generation itself. If that sounds unnecessarily overblown, you need only listen to the care with which each performer manipulates their respective instruments, with measured restraint and eye for the larger whole. Never are there moments of self-indulgent virtuosity or trumped-up displays of expression on Cold Shoulder. It is only very late in the second track, “That Cold Shoulder”, that we get anything resembling phrasing from Ombarchi’s guitar, as the organ becomes looped, freeing his hands to travel the fretboard after so much asceticism. Gutnrie seems to take his cues from the rotation of the imagined Leslie cabinet, building circular flourishes that turn away from the linear march of time. The album as a whole moves laterally as much as it does forward.

Anyone interested in hearing a breathtaking evolution of electroacoustic improvisation should tune in here. The more we connect, and the less we understand about our connections, Cold Shoulder offers a case of trust and generosity that results from truly knowing someone and how and when to let go.