OREN Ambarchi’s future path was defined by a serendipitous mix-up in his grandfather’s Sydney junkshop. Taking home what he thought was a copy of Iron Maiden’s Number Of The Beast, the record inside turned out to be Miles Davis’s even more nefarious Live-Evil. “I was really confused,” recalls Ambarchi. “The music was just bizarre. To my ears it sounded completely chaotic and didn’t make any sense. But I stuck with it, and became really obsessed with [Davis’s] music from that point onwards. It opened the door to a lot of things.” Not only did his grandad’s shop inculcate an early love of freaky sounds, it provided the tools for Ambarchi’s first sonic investigations: “I was bringing home effect pedals and reel-to-reel machines, so I started fooling around with that stuff at home.” He spent his teenage years drumming in free-jazz and noise-rock bands, but was always intrigued by the possibilities of pure sound. When a bandmate abandoned an old guitar in their rehearsal studio, he couldn’t resist picking it up, incorporating its buzzes and clangs into his vivid sound collages. “I always loved guitar, I always loved rock music, but I think I came at it from a different route.”
And so began a remarkably prolific and unconventional recording career, making abstract electronica with guitars or propulsive kraut-jazz freakouts with a “virtual band” that has at times included everyone from Arto Lindsay to BJ Cole. “I love making records,” he enthuses. “It can be tormenting, but it’s really addictive when it works. Just pushing myself to do something different each time really fires me up.”
