oren ambarchi's 'grapes from the estate'
I'm going to see Pavement tomorrow evening and Guided by Voices on Monday. Not sure how I feel about Pavement, but I'm very excited to see GBV. Great band and I imagine their live show is much better than their recorded material. Expect a blog post concerning those bands at some point. The title of this blog is a little misleading. The post will be focused around two records. Oren Ambarchi is an artist I saw opening for Boris w/ Michio Kurihara. He played a set that in my mind was much louder than any of the recorded material I've acquired of his. His recorded material tends to be very subdued and beautifully sparse. His live material has very ominous and from my knowledge (the concert was nearly three years ago) extremely cavernous and huge. His recorded stuff sounds so condensed that it was cool to hear him be very sprawling live. "Grapes From The Estate" is my favorite Oren record and every track is a highlight. The trouble with ambient music is making it simple enough to be subtle, but complex enough to remain interesting. The four pieces on "Grapes From The Estate" encompass that idea completely.
fennesz and ryuichi sakamoto's 'cendre'
Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto are both ambient musicians. Their collaboration "Cendre" is very different from Fennesz's work. The familiar glitchy ambience and solemn soundscapes are there, but Sakamoto seems to make the work very dark. The subtle addition of live piano and field recordings really adds a level of texture to the album that makes it great. Both of these records are excellent companions especially in the early hours of the morning. I find myself slowly drifting off to both Fennesz and Oren constantly in a way that is almost hypnotic. They both know the perfect amount of repetition to instill in a song while still allowing it to be relevant. Fennesz' pieces here are much shorter and less developed than Oren's, but they bleed a atmosphere devoid of Oren's sound. Ripples of sound encapsulating emotion is the only way to describe both of these records.
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