Playing Games

crys cole and Oren Ambarchi embrace the unpredictable

By Jesse Locke

Ambiguity is key to the music of crys cole and Oren Ambarchi. Whether performing solo or in collaboration, the pair of experimental artists aim to draw listeners into their subtle sound worlds rather than hitting them over the head with meaning. One apt example is the duo’s 2017 album, Hotel Record, featuring field recordings made on their trip to Thailand, love letters read through a vocoder, and even the sounds of a game of Uno. These moments are intimate, but also compelling on a purely sonic level, allowing the listener to experience their own emotions and interpretations.

“I always bring it back to John and Yoko, which is embarrassing,” says cole with a laugh during a video call with Ambarchi from their home in Berlin. “When I was a teenager hearing the records they did together for the first time, I loved that they were just putting it out there with the parts of their relationship that could be boring or mundane. I wanted to make music in a similar way with my own palette.”

The couple first crossed paths when Ambarchi, then living in Sydney, travelled to Winnipeg in 2008 to perform at Send + Receive. It was cole’s first year as festival director, yet she was naturally already familiar with the music of the Australian guitarist. Since the late 1980s, Ambarchi’s prolific, unclassifiable output has included numerous collaborations with artists such as Jim O’Rourke, Keith Rowe, and drone metal band Sunn O))), alongside his founding of the esteemed Black Truffle Records. As an accomplished sound artist in her own right with releases on many of the world’s most celebrated labels, cole connected with Ambarchi on this level, while also appreciating his taste in decidedly non-experimental music.

“Oren was DJing an after party at Send + Receive, and at one point I asked him if he was playing music from my iPod,” she remembers. “He said ‘no’ and that he was playing music from his iPod, but I couldn’t believe it. Everything from cheesy pop tunes to random disco 12-inches to free-jazz was totally in line with my taste. That started everything.”

The game of Uno heard on cole and Ambarchi’s Hotel Record initially began during their artistic residency at Stockholm’s EMS. Since 1964, the Swedish centre for sound art and electroacoustic music has welcomed international visitors to its collection of rare analog synthesisers. Without a concept in mind, cole and Ambarchi decided to amplify a deck of cards and run it through a Buchla. “We wanted something that was textural and interactive, because a lot of the music we make as a duo reflects our personal lives,” says cole. “One of the technicians walked in while we were playing and wondered what the hell we were doing!”

Like a competitive form of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, this creative process bled into the duo’s collaborative live performances as a means to introduce unpredictable variables. “Depending on who won a game, there were these parameters in the audio, like one of us having to get up to move a portable speaker or do some other kind of action,” explains Ambarchi. “It also determined how long the set would last. Sometimes we went on for way too long because no one had won the game.”

Playfulness and humour permeates much of the couple’s work, including a strange inside joke buried within the credits of Ambarchi’s upcoming solo album, Shebang. As I scrolled down the Bandcamp page to read the names of contributing musicians, I was surprised to see Dick Wolf listed as executive producer. In another interview, Ambarchi claimed that the duo’s next album would be “recordings of us eating Doritos and watching Law & Order.” When you couple this with Eiko Ishibashi’s recent album For McCoy – dedicated to Sam Waterston’s beloved district attorney – and Jim O’Rourke’s own stories of watching the crime show while cooking, guilty pleasures become something else entirely.

“We watch an episode almost every night, and have a lot of friends that are also quite obsessed,” says Ambarchi. “I’ve had this fantasy to do a Law & Order tribute album on Black Truffle featuring various people. When I emailed Jim and mentioned the idea to him, he sent me an audio file two minutes later. It was the intro to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Good Times Bad Times’ with the stomping rhythm replaced by the Law & Order ‘dum dum’ sound. It was hilarious, and I got so excited!”

Of course, Shebang is much more than just jokes. The third entry in Ambarchi’s series of intricately layered, long-form collaborations features an international cast such as guitarist Julia Reidy, drummer Joe Talia, and legendary pedal steel player BJ Cole – whose credits include Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” An inability to travel required these contributions to be recorded remotely, allowing Ambarchi to send the album to people in fragments. The result of this game of exquisite corpse is a brain-tickling 35-minute Frankensteined groove.

“No one was responding to the same thing at the same time,” says Ambarchi. “When Konrad Sprenger and I put it all together, people were responding to each other in a very strange, almost non-musical way. I try to get away from the usual call and response or obvious forms of communication. That’s exciting for me because it’s unique and different. It’s reflective of the way the world has been for the last few years, but also worked to my advantage.”

A Piece of Work, cole’s latest release, also sprawls across 27 minutes, yet her music is pensive and withdrawn in comparison to Ambarchi’s ecstatic jams. Field recordings made in the spaces between spaces of Oslo, Berlin, Vienna, Melbourne, Lisbon, and Winnipeg blur into a dynamic and occasionally unsettling montage. For Ambarchi, it is precisely these differences in their approaches that he appreciates. “I love collaboration and being pushed into an area of sound that I might not reach if I was on my own,” he concludes. “crys pushes me into places that are challenging, and inspires me to create something new.”