Ghosted the trio of Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin beguile through deceptively simple means. Most of their songs feature an ostinato on the bass, with Berthling playing bluesy figures or limpid harmonics redolent of Jaco Pastorius as he moves between the upright and electric, and the expandable drum patterns of Werliin who can play rhythmic putty or rap out a dry beat on vetiver sticks as all the while Ambarchi trails vapours from behind the guitar, his deft arpeggios and shimmering ambiances whirring away through the rotating baffle chamber of a Leslie speaker.
The result appears to swarm with incident even as it lures listeners into a heady trance-like state, with the trio burnishing their resumes as three of the canniest improvisers and most singular instrumentalists working in jazz and experimental contexts. Berthling in particular is a mainstay of the Swedish jazz scene as part of such long-running projects as Angles, Nacka Forum and Goran KajfeÅ” Tropiques with he and Werliin comprising two-thirds of the core Fire! trio alongside Mats Gustafsson’s physical presence on all manner of woodwinds. Ambarchi has collaborated widely and produced his own rich body of work in the trio format alongside Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke, with some of his recent projects like the acclaimed Shebang or Kind Regards with the drummer Eric Thielemans continuing to show a restless penchant for cajoling unconventional sounds out of his guitar.
The original Ghosted and its successor Ghosted II were mirror images of one another in so far as both albums consisted of four tracks and were built around Berthling’s bass ostinatos, swampy blues figures and limpid harmonics giving way to more spectral airs. Ghosted though hewed more closely to the vestiges of genre with ‘II’ and especially ‘III’ redolent of Can and their motorik rhythms while ‘IV’ felt like a dirge replete with a doleful bass line and loping metal hits. In another direction that album also reminded me of so many classic and contemporary ECM records for its sheer airflow and separation between the instruments. There was a focus on pure tone and a sense of sculpted space, as though each musician were playing in their own sphere with a bit of run or bleed.
Ghosted II felt immediately more propulsive and also more abstracted, vaguely in the realm of fourth world music for its capacity to synthesise a whole smorgasbord of folk inflections while ultimately sounding utterly discrete. Berthling’s bass harmonics might flow with the tine-like pellucidity of a mbira and Ambarchi’s guitar sometimes conjured a koto or harp while Werliin’s rhythms seemed more choppy than ever, figures akimbo as they cut across the screen.
On ‘tre’ clopping percussion and a bass groove moved with a bluesy swagger, as though the doors of a saloon bar were being swung open, while Ambarchi’s light fretting resulted in little blooms or pipettes of colour, like a bundled mass of optical fibres transmitting luminous pulses from their glassy tips. Then on the stunning ‘fyra’ the bass line plunged beneath the surface as the interplay of drums and guitar imbued the piece with a martial air. The short almost clipped envelope – perhaps as the result of some palm muting – and bright lustrous pitch of Ambarchi’s guitar sounded like rapier swordplay, replete with a sense of ritualised sheathing and unsheathing as his adroit thrusts made holes in the sky.
Most of all Ghosted conjure the open road, stripped of features but not of its headlong speed or that sense of easy yet insistent drift. The avenue remains ripe with possibilities and their sweeping panoramas are animated less by geographical features than spectres or smears. My review of Ghosted II described them as ‘a gang of lepidopterists back on the trail with their duffle bags and nets’ and on this third instalment the characterisation of the trio as wily butterfly catchers remains true.
Ghosted III shifts the scaffolding with six tracks and some of a shorter duration. On the album opener ‘Yek’ – after using Roman numerals on Ghosted and Swedish on Ghosted II here the tracks are titled one through six in Persian – the drummer Werliin lays out some rickety percussion as Ambarchi again conjures the plucked zither tradition through the spindly strings of his guitar. Berthling then introduces a flowing ostinato pattern, or perhaps better to say that his bass functions like smoothed rocks in a river bed as the guitar and drums cut past in spurts.
In typical fashion the trio have initiated a groove but cymbal rolls and glimmering broken chords from the guitar interrupt the jagged flow for something more cloudy or gaseous. ‘Yek’ then proceeds in this manner, shifting between koto spininess and arpeggiated passages which languor in a gilded haze. The drums remain on stilts and the bass pattern mutates ever so slightly, tightening up at points then leaving more of an overhang before it buzzes towards the close as the composition finally gets swallowed up in harp washes, Ambarchi raking the sky like a sgraffito decoration or combing the heavens and leaving cherubic striations or smears. A solitary flute or panpipe seems to blow on the way out as if to provide a coda or point of overlap between the first two tracks.
‘Do’ is more nebulous than anything the trio have done previously, all heavenly stasis as they content themselves with noodling in the firmament that lies above. What you get is some light brush work from the percussion, the muted opening gestures of what never resolves into a bass line and some faint gloaming from the guitar.
Lacking the propulsion that is so often their forte, ‘Do’ might sound subdued but it’s a pretty radical departure for the trio and affecting for refusing to settle into any one frame. It sounds both playful and pensive, probing and just happy to dawdle or let sit. While the comparisons that the Ghosted trio do get are often male-oriented – from the improvisational blaze of Fire! to the soft-touch harmonics of Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, the steady grooves of Tortoise or National Information Society and the dub minimalism of Moritz von Oswald’s various projects – on ‘Do’ they call to mind instead some of the ten graphs from Laurel Halo’s sensual ambient jazz collage Atlas.
As the drums provide more of a kick and the guitar twinkles and quavers, by the end of ‘Do’ you feel as though they have arrived at a groove from such slender and provisional or diaphanous fabrics. The piece is just over six minutes in length but you have so thoroughly attuned yourself to their attendant atmosphere.
‘Seh’ is their shortest piece to date and conveys a similar gesture by different means. Berthling delivers a fusion or neo soul bass line, nuzzling into the fuzzy low end of the mix. Ambarchi hangs tremulously and begins to drone like an organ, giving ‘Seh’ the cool meditativeness of new age music. A percussive aspect barely fringes the track near the close, a cladding of shakers and bells that produce only the faintest of rustles. It’s like a distant echo of a beatific clangorousness from some other realm as ‘Seh’ fades out through a slight mbira pattern.
Then on ‘Chahar’ shakers and a woodblock rhythm vie with slantwise gradients from the guitar to suggest something like a game of Jenga or Kerplunk, that sense of alternately building up askew layers then digging in and pulling out in lugs and hunks. Berthling meanwhile establishes a circuitous bass figure, basically a brief meander then an about-turn. Overtones from the guitar begin to waft and coagulate, the strings sounding like frayed wires perhaps with more of the softness and resonance of a gayageum than the crispness of the koto.
Once again a groove which however deft or trenchant seemed constructed or put together – a product of its component parts on the bass, percussion and guitar – now seems to have carved out a wider furrow and attained an air of inevitability. Then suddenly Ambarchi locks into a pattern that jives with the rotations of the Leslie speaker and we have lift off, rotor blades chopping as ‘Chahar’ takes helical ascent with the chuted descent signalled by splotchy harmonics before the improvisation draws to an unusually neat halt.
A more doleful or at least weighty and rotund bass line descends in ostinato on ‘Panj’ as Werliin chugs and trundles from behind the drums. The thick atmosphere recalls something of the short closer to the original Ghosted which sounded like a funeral march or dirge and seemed to gesture towards the rhythms of heavy or doom metal. Ambarchi’s guitar at first whirs above the stygian mire or sludge but as the piece develops it coopts other inflections and accents, levitating and speaking in a kind of warbling vocalese or issuing wavering rays of light.
Still the funereal retinue arrives at the midpoint pretty much intact, the longest treatment of this kind of laden groove that the Ghosted trio have yet delivered. Then other transmissions flit over the radio or stretch into our field of view. We hear a few chimes and the guitar starts to become garbled by feedback which chews into Ambarchi’s tone while producing its own riddles and codes.
The swampy effect summons up TRACES the debut album by Cosmic Ear from earlier this year, a Swedish supergroup of sorts led by the saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and trumpeter Goran KajfeÅ” but steered spiritually by the elder statesman Christer BothĆ©n, who is the sole artist to have featured on a Ghosted record with his donso ngoni cleaving into Berthling’s bluesy two-note bass line on their opening salvo ‘I’.
After a stint in Mali, it was BothĆ©n at the turn of the seventies who introduced Don Cherry to the ngoni or hunter’s harp, the traditional West African griot medium, with ‘Panj’ as it transcends the mire through the persistence of its quest sharing something of Cosmic Ear’s take on ‘Love Train’, the Cherry classic from his 1974 album Eternal Now. In a similar vein – for his evocation of the blues and immersion in a distinctly West African rhythmic tradition – I think of the great bassist (and sometime reedman and ngoni player) William Parker at his swampiest, most recently alongside a couple of his enduring collaborative partners Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake as the Heart Trio.
The guitar on ‘Panj’ becomes a dank well of juddering static, a piece which feels shamanistic and certainly enters a trance before bouncing out, with a cinematic flair to the production on Ghosted III of some of these moody and declamatory or wispy instrumental tail ends. The music was recorded over a couple of days last December by Daniel Bengston at Rymden in Stockholm before being mixed in Melbourne by Joe Talia and Ambarchi.
Ghosted III seeps to a close with ‘Shesh’. The piece opens on a kind of conventional riff that could have emanated from a shoegaze or grunge band in the early nineties, My Bloody Valentine say or the Smashing Pumpkins especially on ‘Rhinoceros’ from their Gish era. Werliin traces out another slow drum groove, crested by the odd cymbal splash, while Ambarchi upholds that arpeggiated riff with a bloom at the tail and Berthling’s bass bobs and drones at the deepest recesses. The rumbles and crashes of percussion become more emphatic and they along with some bead-like sparkles of guitar produce a climax of sorts as the trio ride out their latest endeavour.
All in all then Ghosted III seems to split the difference between gossamer or vaporous experiments which stray from the propulsive grooves we have come to expect from the trio, who at the same time fold a few familiar or even popular forms back into their work, nodding from their misty hill towards the distant borders of genre. If the opener ‘Yek’ suggests a charted course the poles of the album are ‘Shesh’ and ‘Panj’ which conjure grunge or a kind of swamp blues jazz and the celestial ‘Do’ which just refuses to cohere. Ghosted III retains all of those qualities which make them unique while opening up new portals and vistas.
