Oren Ambarchi

The Graham Foundation

Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610

Australian artist Oren Ambarchi plays Sbagliato for two guitars—in the work’s first U.S. performance.

Oren Ambarchi (b.1969, Sydney, Australia) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar. Ambarchi’s works are hesitant and tense extended song-forms, located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal.

He has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists such as Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), Thomas Brinkmann, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Manuel Gottsching/Ash Ra, Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, Crys Cole, Fire! and many more. His acclaimed trio with Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke performs in Tokyo annually with many of their concerts documented on Ambarchi’s Black Truffle label. Ambarchi has released numerous recordings for labels such as Touch, Editions Mego, Drag City, PAN, Southern Lord, Kranky and Tzadik. His latest solo release is Hubris (2016) and features an astonishing cast of players including Crys Cole, Mark Fell, Arto Lindsay, Jim O’Rourke, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Ricardo Villalobos, among others.

In April 2014, Oren Ambarchi performed the first solo version of Knots for Lampo.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation