Audiopile Review: With 2022’s ‘Ghosted’, Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin struck upon a magnificent formula. Ambarchi took his cues from The Necks (fellow Australians, after all), to oversee the creation of a potent brew mixing repetition with improvisation. The result was an eternal-sounding music that felt like it had always been going on and would always continue. No surprise, then, to see ‘Ghosted II’ appear, especially given the ecstatic notices that greeted this trio’s first volume. Can is another relevant point of reference and, if ‘Ghosted’ was ‘Ege Bamyasi’, this new one is ‘Future Days’. That’s to say, it’s lusher and more tuneful. Anyone who has heard Berthling’s wonderful group Tape will know he has a gift for melody. And it’s his melodic basslines that provide the hook here, while Werliin’s percussion is funkier and more exotic than before. All this teases Ambarchi out of his guitar-drone comfort zone. The nocturnal imagery used to promote these albums is somewhat misleading. Despite being undeniably sparse, ‘Ghosted II’ is breezier and more colourful than the cover art suggests. Far from ghostlike, this is music that lives and breathes.

An utterly unique guitar/bass/drums triad: the guitar sounds like anything but a guitar; bass and drums simultaneously insistent and relaxed. Telephathic group-think opens a window to fresh fields of fusion: funk-jazz heads, polyrhythmic skeletons, ambient pastorals, post-kraut drones and shimmering soundtrack reveries. A music of sustained tension and deep atmosphere, marked by subtle, shifting dynamics playing out in an open sound field.