Oren Ambarchi
Suspension
Touch Music

How do you talk about a sensation that slithers up close to your heart, in a treacle down from the pendant ears, dropping between the teats and nipple hairs, like a snake of sweat, sliding and collapsing off the branches, these two movements so cautious yet frighteningly drastic at the same moment? With such a shock, you realize that the eyes and arms, the guts too, have been clenched for over long, from fear, from caffeine, that obscure object of anger, the entire body is in damned trapped in an imagined grip. And there ain't nothing in those fists! You are actually drifting, have been, lifted up on the waters, a mere drop merrily scurrying down the river. There are howls and barbs out here, but they are far-flung and distant.

When it comes to Mister Ambarchi here, he definitely has a way about him that helps with such corporeal journeys. Maybe it was culled in the Australian Outback, when he was abandoned to the rowdies, dingoes, and dusty aborigines, or maybe from the time he was left abandoned in the middle of a game of Zorn's Cobra in the early nineties downtown scene. Regardless, he has sailed through such a past and into some very aware and present waters, keeping close to his true powers, which is the perspicacious ability to tether these drifts to a lone guitar. From such a base, you are free to fall into the darkness venturing, into a dreamland as yet unheard, spreading out violet ripples over the unstrung voids, the energy nets popping and fizzling every once in awhile from such moments, as the tensions slowly work themselves loose, these subtle actions loosing little pearls of lightning, all percolative, with lilting glitches and slow, bellowing breaths. Gently in and out it goes, as you sink deeper into the disc.

Throughout the hour plus of music, there is a delicious disorientation, between luxurious extremes of dissonance and distilled tones. Eternally between bites of a sweet, dripping Gala apple, its golden and rouge skin dissolves at your lips, the jaws arise and collapse; its delectable juices spread. Or the exhilaration of trampoline jumps off the bed, hanging from taffy curtains, a close rustle as they stir and tear, mid-air, mere inches from the hardwood floors, above the drifts of dust bunnies, away from the windows, the wind like freight cars, roaring far outside, yet under you too. Perhaps even outside of the bedroom, when you let go on the subway, just to wobble with the rails, or in Einstein's elevator, with the flashlight bowed like a singing saw, where it's all just a slow suspension of falling. A warm decay inside such dizziness.

Look back at the cover, realizing that even with all the stacks of apples, it is not repetitious, there is little repeating, it is not the same thing over and over and over, but each time through is a rewriting, a self-righting and adjusting of the sounds. It is wormed deep down into the permutations and sliding distortions on the whole apple/orange spectrum, to where there are no longer any mistakes! Sometimes a leaf on the stem, sometimes a mealy core or brown bruise, maybe two stickers at $1.29 on 'em, one apple a candy luminance, refracting the store-light, the other a little more dull on the skin, but its meat ever-sweet, glistening anew at first bite. It always feels like the first time too. All these apples, all exactly arranged in the, ahem, universal bodega's wiggly dance, all slowly dying. For you to bite in.

Copyright © 2001 Andy Beta