Black Truffle
In this concert, recorded at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Centre in 2009, three distinct and very strong personalities construct a sonic edifice derived by a combination of experimentation, intensity and desire to abandon any inclination to affirm a status or define a genre. Ambarchi manipulates the guitar according to his renown, amassing imposing subsonic throbs and quaking bumps, generating a sense of profound vastness which reminds of human impotence in front of certain phenomena. O’Rourke plays the piano in all its components, eliciting clattering sounds, drones, percussiveness and atonal twinkle depending on the circumstance, seemingly content of remaining in the mid-background and simply contribute to the formation of the vibrational tissue.
On the other side, Haino utilizes electronics, a flute and a drum machine; needless to say, he’s better recognizable when the voice is a part of the equation. He delivers the goods impressively – scarily at times – through vocalizations that may start as invocations but, in “Tima Formosa 3”, end sounding like a desperate attempt to push back some sort of ferocious demon trying to steal the good vibrations that the music had generated until then. It is in those moments, where the full force of the collective vibe becomes substantial, that an expert listener realizes how this mixture of beguilement and violence involves artistic backgrounds and spiritual implications that the hundreds of wretched imitators can only dream of, despite glowing praise by bandwagon-jumping reviewers who acclaim stuff that has no actual grounding, similarly to their listening experience.
