Shebang cover

Shebang

Released

Oren Ambarchi is our poet of evenness. The bible of this was and is Hubris (2016), a massive work that, like another composition of his, Knots, has various iterations. On Shebang, Ambarchi begins with guitar but conceives like a drummer, which he is. He is joined by a dozen or so players, building out from hammered guitar figures that reproduce the dynamic flatline of an electric fan hitting a pencil. Ambarchi introduces variation by adding instruments and shifting tonality while keeping a fixed level of attack for each instrument. It’s a play on minimalism, with more chaos in the arrangement than you’d get from Reich and more machine-like drive than you hear in an Eastman score.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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