I have a problem with patience. Most people do, I think, in an era that has systematically trained us out of it — the scroll, the skip, the thirty-second preview, the algorithm that adjusts to your attention span and then shortens it. I've been noticing this in myself and finding it alarming. Listening to Oren Ambarchi has become, among other things, a practice in recovering the capacity for sustained attention. This sounds like medicine rather than pleasure, which is wrong — the pleasure is real and profound — but the practice element is not incidental.
Ambarchi is an Australian guitarist and composer who has been making music at the edges of rock and experimental and contemporary composition for decades, and his recent work is the most patient of his patient career. There are tracks that develop over twenty, thirty minutes, that return to the same material again and again with small variations, that seem to be exploring a single idea from all possible angles before they allow themselves to end. This is music that makes a demand on you that most music doesn't make.
The demand is worth meeting. When you give Ambarchi the attention he's asking for — when you sit with the music, let it move at its own pace, resist the impulse to summarise and move on — what you find is extraordinary. The long durations reveal patterns that aren't visible in short exposure. The variations that seemed invisible at first become audible after ten minutes of listening. The emotional content arrives gradually rather than immediately, and when it arrives it's deeper than the content that announces itself in the first thirty seconds of a more conventional piece.
The Guitar as Meditation Object
Ambarchi's relationship with the guitar is unlike most guitarists' relationships with their instrument. He's not interested in the guitar as a vehicle for virtuosity or expression in the conventional sense. He's interested in the guitar as a sound-producing object, in the physical properties of the instrument and the sounds it makes when pushed against or away from its conventional uses. He collaborates extensively — with Jim O'Rourke, with Keiji Haino, with a long list of other experimental musicians — and those collaborations shape the sonic language of each project.
The recent work with his own ensemble has a quality that I find hypnotic. The guitar is processed in ways that make it continuous with the electronic and orchestral elements, so you're never quite sure whether you're hearing string resonance or electronic tone. The lack of clear categories between the sound sources is part of what makes the music immersive — there are no seams to pull you out of the experience.
On Slowness as Value
The cultural devaluation of slowness is one of the things I find most distressing about the current moment. Not in a luddite, everything-was-better-before way — I'm not interested in nostalgia as a position — but in the specific sense that slowness is a mode of perception, a way of being in relation to time, that enables experiences that fast attention cannot enable. Ambarchi's music requires slowness. It gives you slowness in return. The exchange is fair and the result is access to forms of experience that are unavailable at speed.
I've played Ambarchi to people who found it boring. I respect that response. Boredom is a real response. But I've also played it to people who found it revelatory, who came out of an hour of listening with a different relationship to their own capacity for attention, who felt that something had been reset or recalibrated in how they listened. That's not nothing. That's quite a lot.
I keep coming back to this music. Every time, it asks me to slow down. Every time, I'm glad I did.
The music has made me better at other kinds of listening — not just to music, but to rooms, to conversations, to the sounds that surround daily life that I normally filter out. Ambarchi trained my ear on patience and the patience generalised. That might be the most useful thing I can say about art: sometimes it changes how you receive everything else.
I think that's the deepest function of this music: it teaches patience through pleasure. Not through deprivation, not by making you wait for something that doesn't arrive, but by making the waiting itself the arrival. The process is the destination. Thirty minutes into an Ambarchi piece you're not closer to the end — you're more fully inside the beginning, which has been unfolding this whole time. That's a different relationship with time than almost anything else offers. I'm grateful for it.
