Oren Ambarchi, Günter Müller, Philip Samartzis - Strange Love
(For4ears)
Strange Love's artwork, heavy on night shots of what appear to be Australian Brushtail Possums, makes an interesting first impression. The marsupials, seemingly oblivious to the camera, are caught mid-scurry, with bizarrely glowing red eyes. The tie-in between the disc's music and the artwork is that both tracks were recorded in Australia during Müller's visit for the What Is Music? festival in July, 2002, and, of course, that Ambarchi and Samartzis are both residents of the land down under. The possums, really, don't have much more of a connection to the music, though the red-eyed little animals, seemingly part robot or alien with their glowing, pupil-less stares, do share something more subtle with the sounds on this CD. Like Müller's photos, Strange Love has a feeling of being both natural and synthetic; the electro-acoustic improvisations both mimic the natural world and distance themselves from it.
Ambarchi, as usual, is credited with guitar and electronics, but it's a fruitless task to try to deduce which sounds are the product of his six-string. In fact, any attempts to link sounds to their sources are ill advised, though the crediting of Samartzis with "environmental sounds" might explain specific parts of the music's feel. Strange Love is meditative music, mingling tones that are sometimes as smooth as silk and other times gritty like sandpaper. The old adage of never being able to step in the same river twice holds true here, as the constantly flowing music is never still. It's not hard to hear mimicry of cicadas or crickets in Strange Love's electronic emulsion, a crackling fire in the beginning of "Warmer," or synthetic respiration in subtle breaths. These are only ghost voices, however, as Samartzis' use of found sound, however, seems to be limited to somewhat jarring and out of place samples of voice and ambient sound that don't often gel with the rest of the restrained waves.
"Cooler," which begins the disc, was recorded live that July, at the aforementioned festival. "Warmer" was constructed through the mail the next year, but there's little of a difference in feeling between the two. Ambarchi, Müller, and Samartzis prove to be expert collaborators, whether they're sharing a stage or sharing files between different continents. Strange Love is an excellent product of this collaboration, and hopefully not the last.
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