Australian ex-pats and experimental sonic explorers – Berlin-based guitarist (and former drummer) Oren Ambarchi (of Ghosted trio with Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin) and Nantes-based drummer Will Guthrie have been collaborating for more than two decades, and have established an expansive, intuitive interplay. Cold Shoulder is their second duo album, following Knotting (Some Fine Legacy, 2019), recorded live at Morphine Raum in Berlin in October 2024.

Ambrachi’s effects pedal-based electric guitar is channelled through electronic devices and often sounds like a twisted, vintage organ or guitar-synth, while Guthrie is interested in gamelan music and leads the experimental Ensemble Nist-Nah that takes the gamelan traditional music into experimental, contemporary music, noise, and free jazz territories.

Cold Shoulder offers two extended pieces. «This Cold Shoulder» is a spacious, atmospheric piece, where Ambrachi’s psychedelic, spiralling organ-like tones ride on Guthrie’s skeletal drumming, including the chiming cymbals and ringing gongs. Ambrachi and Guthrie’s interplay is telepathic and intuitive and cements a profound play between stating and dissolving rhythmic cycles, as Francis Plagne, fellow Australian guitarist and collaborator of Ambrachi and Guthrie, noted in his liner notes.

«That Cold Shoulder» intensifies the commotion, and now Ambarchi’s guitar sounds more aggressive, producing layers of resonant feedback, answered by Guthrie’s restless percussive pyrotechnics. Both Ambarchi and Guthrie are possessed in their own mysterious, circular dance of freedom. So free that they do not need to explain the portrait of George Michael on the cover.

Eyal Hareuveni

Oren Ambarchi (guitar), Will Guthrie (drums)

https://futuraresistenza.bandcamp.com/album/cold-shoulder