Ambarchi, O’Malley, Dunn – Shade Themes from Kairos Review

Ambarchi, O’Malley, Dunn – Shade Themes From Kairos (Drag City)
★★★★★

An incoming storm approaches. The voices run at random bursts from a metronome. It’s like a haunting shadow of the city. “The Space Between” is everything that encompases this trio and an experience that surrounds Shade Themes From Kairos.

Urban noir.

The song demonstrates a guitar manifesto and builds from the sensors that a band like Can developed in the ‘70s. This is a state of mind. Bubbles floating in space. Psychedelic flickering. Listen to that motor purr.

These instrumentals are orgys, building on themselves, percolating. The more you listen, the more you feel like you are staring at the sun. Is this an utopia?

What started as Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley being hand selected by filmmaker Alexis Destoop to score his short feature, “Kairos.” The two gathered Randall Dunn to design and fill the studio space. The results emanate from an old Belgian radio station turned into studio space.

Ambarchi/O’Malley/Dunn – Temporal, Eponymous (Official Video)

Shade Themes From Kairos goes beyond a simple film score. What the three realized are that these songs deserved more. The band reconvened in Seattle to take these songs even further. The result only can be described as music stretching into infinity like a sonic aneurysm. There is something from the beyond on “Temporal, Eponymous” that blows in and increases your levels of perceptibility. It’s almost too much. Volume feels electrified, doubling on itself, like throbbing nerve endings.

“Circumstance of Faith” are the shaded pergolas at night. The soft fluorescence and that distant hum could be destroyed by chaos at any given moment. Bloodshot eyes, TV static, the final moments from this song is a furious bolt of lightning.

An album like Shade Themes From Kairos is more about life perception and art appreciation than what the original themes try to convey. If the band did not want you to explore the depths of your own mind then they would not have expanded their own mind to create these post 10-minute, stretched-out power rockers.