Japanese noise legend Keiji Haino, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley and frequent collaborator Oren Ambarchi are set to release a new album under the group name of Nazoranai later this month. It consists of four dense and longform tracks, and will be released through O’Malley’s own Ideologic Organ label, an imprint of the consistently great Editions Mego. As is to be expected from three such heavyweight operators, it’s a bleakly beautiful affair, shifting from slow and sparse landscapes reminiscent of post-industrial wreckage and wasteland (complete with throat-shredding screams and low-low meditational chants), to huge firestorms of riff and distortion. It’s also – unsurprisingly given the names involved – pretty great.
Nazoranai had its genesis when Ambarchi first introduced Sunn O))) to Haino in Canada in 2006. They later performed briefly together when Haino spontaneously joined them onstage. Five years later, all three were in Holland at the same time, and decided to play an improvised show as a trio. Afterwards they played a handful of shows together. The album is a recorded document of a gig in Paris in November 2011, and tracks the development of their musical interactions in real time.
Quietus scribe Russell Cuzner recently interviewed Ambarchi for a feature that will run in full later this month. "I’ve always been a huge fan of [Keiji Haino’s]," Ambarchi enthuses of his collaborative work with Haino, "a huge fan. I mean, he’s the reason why I play guitar: when I saw him in 1992 in New York that was a big life-changing moment for me, so I’m really honoured to be able to work with someone like that quite regularly."
He also goes into some detail about the Nazoranai collaboration, and its capturing of an improvisational approach. "I think the night before [when] we played and someone was recording it, the power in their laptop, the adaptor, blew up before the end of the gig and they lost the whole thing," he says. "[So] you never really know what’s gonna happen, and you forget. A lot of stuff I do, someone happens to record it – sometimes you’re really lucky, and this show’s a good one and it’s been captured. But it’s completely improvised, and when you’re actually playing you completely forget, you’re not even concerned that it’s being recorded, you’re just playing the gig and trying to be in the moment as much as possible… Yeah, that particular gig in Paris was a really long show – three hours – so they’re just segments of that particular show that I edited and mixed. It’s pretty simple, it’s basically a recording of a power trio playing live, there’s nothing really fancy with the editing: it’s a simple document of the gig basically."
Watch out for the full interview with Ambarchi on the Quietus later this month. Nazoranai is released through Ideologic Organ next week. More information is available here.
Â
