For the 15 minutes of “Hidden Tableau,” Ambarchi seems all but absent, as the rest of his ensemble creates a haze that is somehow menacing and inviting. O’Rourke and double bassist Johan Berthling shape a steady drone, while Ishibashi’s piano runs suggest time-lapse footage of ice crystals forming, ordinary little bits cohering into objects of wonder. But Sprenger is like Victor Frankenstein, his electronic voice and its warped utterances breathing an uneasiness into everything around it. Joe Talia’s drums amplify that ambiguity; he canters, but the sound is fried, like an MP3 scored on Napster in 1999 and salvaged for a sample. The band hovers in a razor-thin lacuna between heaven and hell, between ascension and purgatory, on the verge of going either way. When Ambarchi finally emerges from the recesses of this sound, he only reinforces that feeling, his rapid and bright guitar hinting at the finger-tapping rock heroics of, say, Eddie Van Halen but stuck in a labyrinth where the exits have been barred. The track simply stops rather than fades away—no easy answers, no resolution.
“Sleight of Hand” moves in the opposite direction. Ambarchi introduces the piece, his electric guitar conjuring a conversational Pat Metheny as Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin (the Swedish rhythm section from Ambarchi’s recent and excellent Ghosted trilogy) join him stepwise. They seem to be having a lazy debate, perhaps less unsure of an answer than the question itself, each of them moving in and out of the meter while an organ sighs to the side. Ambarchi slowly recedes, leaving a vacuum filled across the next 15 minutes by various voices: the chattering electronics of Marcus Pal, which evoke climbing a rainbow; the whirling shō melody of Michiko Ogawa, which sounds like a particularly shocking saxophone solo; and, finally, the delightful whistles of clarinetist-cum-jazz whistler Isak Hedtjärn, which suggest pulling back the curtains on this intricate sound only to be surprised by actual humans behind it, smiling as they play their parts. “Sleight of Hand” is occasionally intense enough to be intimidating, especially in the way the rhythm section lumbers but lashes. Just before it all fades out, though, the band locks into a danceable groove, all the previous layers moving in subservience to the rhythm. It sounds like someone is clapping in the distance, but maybe that’s just me.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
