Oren Ambarchi / Stephen O'Malley / Randa — Shade Themes from Kairos

'Shade Themes from Kairos' is far from the first collaboration between Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O'Malley and Randall Dunn. These artists have been increasingly occurring on each others releases and those of their peers to suggest a strong network of highly experimental rock that spans the globe from Ambarchi's Australia, through O'Malley's base in mainland Europe to Dunn's studio in the States. Indeed, throughout the past decade Ambarchi and Dunn have participated in numerous releases from O'Malley's Sunn O))), while O'Malley and Ambarchi also get together in Nazoranai, a power trio with Japan's Keiji Haino, and Dunn was involved in the recording of Ambarchi's triumphant solo album, 'Audience of One', released on Touch in 2012. However, this is the first explicit union of the three, promoting Dunn from his usual credit as producer or engineer.

The music was originally commissioned by Belgian filmaker, Alexis Destoop, as a soundtrack for his short film, Kairos, and is presented in an expanded form on this release. Kairos the movie is apparently a dystopian science fiction that describes a future corporation that manage to mine and commodify time itself, presented as an allegory on the effects of colonialism on the Australian outback. The music, however, is far from futuristic, pooling together a rich range of analogue and acoustic instrumentation from the obligatory guitars and drums to more exotic fare such as crotales, a sruti box and mellotron.

The opening track, 'That Space Between', introduces the album's ancient meets modern compositional meld, with the cries of a haunted synth kicking off an extended procession of percussion and weaving guitar to form a liturgical, atavistic mood. This old world reverence permeates the album with much greater focus placed on ritualistic rhythms and varying textures of tones than on riffage or melodic progress.

'Temporal, Eponymous', the second track, perhaps alludes to 'Kairos' original meaning from ancient greek as a rupture in time. Here, the lengthy guitar tones strengthen, all threatening and ominous, as cymbals splash around them to describe a more aggressive, travelling chapter. 'Circumstances of Faith' follows with a long path of eerie, radiophonic bloopery leading through a brooding, pulsing passage into a full on psychedelic freak out with Tor Deitrichson's tabla at the centre of the centrifugal cacophony.

The electric storm is followed by the album's most introspective moment, simply called 'Sometimes', aided by the gentle vocal tones of Ai Aso over deliciously shuffling brushed drums and a tentative acoustic guitar. This is all to provide a point of contrast, of course, before the album's epic closer, the 21 minute 'Ebony Pagoda', which, as its title suggests, is built from layers of blackened guitar suspensions, gliding between jubilance and malevolence. Casting the drums that first delivered us here aside, it is perhaps the closest to what one might expect from this trio based on their previous outings together.

'Shade Themes from Kairos', with its focus on rhythm, casts this trio in yet another light. By initially straying away from the power of droning guitars deftly demonstrated on many of their other releases, then bringing this dimension in at the end, they serve to provide a more varied and evocative experience. Maybe it's just because 'Kairos' sounds like Cairo, but the world of Ancient Egypt formed in my mind each time I listened to this strangely beguiling album. The mystery, customs and sense of ritual that Egypt's long history firmly evokes is richly rendered throughout 'Shade Themes....', providing not so much a soundtrack but a vivid, if not entirely lucid, world in its own right.