Sun — s/t
Released last year on Preservation Music, the untitled debut album of the Australian duo (Oren Ambarchi and Chris Townend) is now re-released on the excellent German label Staubgold (Kammerflimer Kollektief, Ekkehard Ehlers, Faust, Sack and Blumm) under the guise of a double album, the second CD being a remix of the first one. Chris Townend used to be in a band that is said to have been one of the first to mix electronics and rock in Autsralia. He now runs his own studio (where Portishead have recorded a lot of their forthcoming album) and plays on film scores.
As I said, Sun is very different from what we’re used to from Ambarchi. Gone are the drones and other rather abrasive experimentalism, please welcome pure pop sensibility. In the last few years, people like Otomo have started releasing albums of songs, with actual melodies and hooks. Sun confirms this tendency: just as much as Picasso wouldn’t have been the great innovator he was if he hadn’t known how to draw in a realistic manner, musicians wouldn’t be able to push boundaries if they weren’t able to write “proper” song. So much for experimentalism snobs...
Ambarchi and Townend have decided to show restraint: drums, guitars, bass, harmonica, a little bit of keyboards here and there, no production effects. And it works. You can really hear that the musicians are having a good time, and revel in this low profile work. While the music is simple, it is in no way simplistic. Sophisticated without showing off. With an eye over ‘60’s pop most pared down songs, this record reminds me quite a bit of Jim O’Rourke song oriented work, a lighter version of Eureka. Most of the songs being relatively up-lifting, this is as close as you’re going to get to a summer record for depressive “alternative” or “avant-garde” crowds.
After a beautiful first CD, the second one is full of nice moments with remixes of each tracks of the album by people such as Mapstation, Rafael Toral, Hrvatski and Christoph Heeman. As it is the case with all remix CD’s, some of the tracks are not really enthralling. Some of them just consist in adding a few electronic elements to the original track. Thankfully, Mapstation (Stefan Schneider from To rococo rot) shows what a great remix is: picking up short fragments of the original and building a whole new track with it. So is Pimmon. The Norbert Möslang remix is quite good too, although it sounds as if he just had added his own track above the original song.
This two CD-set is excellent. But it’s the first CD that will be remembered. Tracks like Reach for the sky and I don’t mind are deeply touching songs. Oren Ambarchi will never give up experimentalism (and he shouldn’t, his work being of very high quality) but let’s hope Sun won’t prove a born dead project.