25 September 2026 – Oren Ambarchi Gets Thoroughly Cooked on Two Side-Long Experiments

Oren Ambarchi's Cooked arrives through Drag City with only two major compositions, but anybody mistaking that for a shortage of material should inspect the guest list. Ambarchi gathers musicians from Australia, Germany, Japan and Sweden for two sprawling pieces, "Hidden Tableau" and "Sleight of Hand," continuing the collaborative studio method that made 2022's Shebang such an engrossing listen.

"Hidden Tableau" begins with Eiko Ishibashi's piano before Konrad Sprenger's synthesized voice enters and promptly makes the room considerably stranger. Johan Berthling, Jim O'Rourke and Joe Talia are among the additional contributors, while the second side brings gamelan, shō, celeste, organ, whistling, guitars and multiple percussion approaches into an arrangement that sounds suspiciously like somebody emptied an experimental-music festival into one recording studio.

Ambarchi's great skill is preventing this kind of abundance from turning into a virtuoso traffic jam. Repetition and groove provide structure while tiny changes accumulate until the music has travelled surprisingly far without announcing the journey. Cooked therefore rewards the listener who stops waiting for conventional songs to begin and starts paying attention to texture, movement and interaction instead. It is ambient-adjacent experimental music with an unusually active pulse: cerebral enough for headphones, but occasionally funky enough to make the furniture nervous.