Collaborating for more than two decades, Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie arrive at a place of expansive, intuitive interplay on »Cold Shoulder«. Their musical dialogue, which previously moved through abstraction and volatile electro-acoustic experimentation, now unfolds with relaxed confidence, melding drifting Leslie tones, shimmering percussion, and fluid pulses that emerge and dissolve. It's a document of experience; music that feels freer, more direct, perhaps quietly fearless.

"I’ve been listening to Oren Ambarchi and Will Guthrie—in recordings, at gigs, and (very occasionally) while playing with them—for two decades now. Listening to »Cold Shoulder«, a beautifully recorded and mixed duo show captured in Berlin at the end of 2024, reminded me of how much their music has developed over these years. When I first heard Oren play live around 2004 or 2005—at The Empress, an old-school pub that acted as an unlikely node of Melbourne’s experimental music scene for many years—his work was still firmly rooted in the distinctive clipped, bass-heavy tones immortalised on »Suspension« (2001), which most listeners would struggle to connect to the guitar used to produce them. Having already broadened the palette with other instruments and a more directly melodic sensibility on the lovely »Grapes from the Estate« (2004), his music was expanding in multiple directions. The first show I heard him play surprised the audience with a set based on rapidly pulsating tones, paying homage to his love of the Sähkö catalogue, and looking forward to later kinetic workouts like »Hubris« and »Shebang«.

I first heard Will play around the same time, as one half of the duo Charlie Charlie with Erell Latimier, during his long detour away from the drum kit. Seated at a table covered in DIY electronics, radios, percussion instruments, and other objects, they performed a set of densely layered concrète noise, filled with snatches of broadcast voices, bursts of feedback, and the clang of amplified metal. Like Will’s solo performances of the same period, in its basic approach this was what at the time was being called ›eai‹ (Electro-Acoustic Improvisation), but of a particularly volatile kind, where static textures could be suddenly overtaken by eruptions of howling noise, cutting from one moment to the next with the severity of a tape edit. (Will’s 2005 self-released CDR »Spear« is a mini masterpiece in this vein).

Forward twenty years, and »Cold Shoulder« captures a very different moment in Oren and Will’s work, marked by its expansiveness and relaxed confidence. The drum kit reasserted its central place in Will’s music many years ago, with his recent solo work developing in tandem with the exploration of Gamelan and other instruments in the hybrid percussion ensemble Nist-Nah. Oren’s singularly effects-pedal-based approach to the electric guitar has continued to develop restlessly over recent years, as certain elements he returns to insistently—the swirling, stuttering Leslie cabinet tones, organ-like sustained chords, and guitar-synth glides—have become new signatures. Those drifting, spiralling Leslie tones are one of the first things we hear on »Cold Shoulder«, joined by Will’s chiming cymbals and ringing gongs. Even in these opening moments of ambient drift, Will’s playing has a subtly implied pulse; the play between stating and dissolving rhythmic cycles is one of the joys of his performance here. Oren plays a similar game with melody, as a single line will rise out of the harmonic cloud to form a motif, fading back again before anything gets too fixed.

The movement between moments is beautifully organic, meaning both an embracing of continuous flow and a seizing of opportunities for the music to make sudden lateral shifts. I can’t help but feel that, for both players, the journey through the extremes of abstraction was necessary to allow them to make music this direct and intuitive. Will shows his mastery of the ›vibrating skins and metal‹ approach to the kit pioneered by players like Han Bennink and Tony Oxley, but he can also make you appreciate the beauty of a tambourine played in the conventional way. Oren’s approach to the guitar is still a long way from Jim Hall (one of his guitar heroes), but he increasingly plays the instrument in a recognisable way, in, for instance, the beautiful Henry Kaiser-goes-Alice Coltrane harp ripples built up to in the second half of this performance. A lot of writing about music celebrates the virtues of youthfulness, and we can all think of bands who got less interesting with time. But »Cold Shoulder« shows us something different: a freedom that comes with decades of experience, a lack of anxiety that means Oren and Will can simply play (and have the insouciance to choose a portrait of George Michael for the cover). I can only hope that we’ll all still be around to hear what they’re doing in 2046!«

— Francis Plagne