Alternative Oren Ambarchi

Presuming you've had your fill of Australian movies at this years festival, if you’d like to reconnect with cutting edge alternative Australian music Oren Ambarchi is an electronic guitarist and drummer with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. Ambarchi is giving two live shows this week in Israel : on 3/7/08 at Uganda in Jerusalem and at the Levontin 7 in Tel Aviv on Saturday night.
Oren Ambarchihas been performing live since 1986.This is Ambarachi’s second visit to Israel as a performer; the first time combining excruciatingly high volume levels and incredibly low frequency bass levels and causing almost unbearable joy for those in the audience.
Oren Ambarchi was born in 1969 in Sydney, to a family of Sephardic Jews from Iraq. He spent his teenage years learning to play the drums, favouring free jazz at first. Listening to John and Alice Coltrane and other spiritual jazz allowed for his Jewish roots to catch on to him. He went to New York to study at an orthodox Jewish school in Brooklyn, immersing himself in chabad mysticism by day and experimental music by night. He lived that way for about 3-4 years studying Judaism during the day and listening to jazz and experimental music at night. Eventually, feeling he couldn’t commit to both these lifestyles he chose music. Back in Australia, and strongly influenced by the Japanoise scene, he put together the noise/punk group Phlegm with drummer Robbie Avenaim, and later the Sisters of Menstruation.
Musically Ambarchi started as a free jazz drummer, went through a Japanoise phase, and ended up cutting himself a place under the avant-garde sun as a lowercase guitarist in the early 2000s.
His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar, though he also plays percussion in some of his live performances. Amongst other things he co-organises the What Is Music Festival with Avenaim, starting in 1994 and which quickly turned into an annual festival.
He recorded his first solo LP, Stacte (Jerker Productions, 1998), at home in one take. That, and Stacte.2 (1999), attracted the attention of the British experimental electro label Touch for whom he subsequently recorded Insulation (2000) and Suspension (2001).