“Records Are Definitely My Education”: An Interview with Oren Ambarchi

by MLP / photo by Ujin Matsuo

Oren Ambarchi keeps busy. In addition to regularly performing around the world, the experimental multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire releases an average of two albums per year—all while running his own record label, Black Truffle. As is the norm in improvised music, his records are often collaborations. He’s recorded with everyone from Loren Connors to Charlemagne Palestine, and always manages to meld his own talents to best suit his collaborators’. In October of 2023, I sat down with Oren for a coffee in Berlin, where he’s lived for years together with his partner and fellow composer Crys Cole. I began by asking about his most recent releases at that time.

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Oren Ambarchi: It’s funny because Double Consciousness and Placelessness are quite old [recordings] and for whatever reason they both came out [in 2023]. They are releases that are recorded [gigs] and then you forget about them, and then they come out—whereas Ghosted and Shebang were conscious albums. Although Ghosted was very spontaneous. We made it before the pandemic, just for fun. I happened to be playing in Scandinavia and those guys were like ‘hey let’s record’ and there was no preconceived notion about what we would do. It was totally live in the studio. Now it’s become a project. In fact I just signed off today [Oct 26th, 2023] on the master for Ghosted II [which released April 26th, 2024].  

We recorded that in June or July of this year. Again, it was a day or two in the studio, [and we] just played. I love playing with [Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin], they’re amazing players. I feel like I can just do anything, I feel very open and free with them. It’s a pleasure.

MLP: Do you go into most performances just with this kind of openness, just improvisation?

I do. When I play solo I definitely have a tuning, and I might have some sort of recurring motif that I [sometimes] fall back on, but it’s super open. Other than that I don’t really know where it’s gonna go or how I’m going to get from A to B, or even if I’m going to B. I think if you asked me that six years ago, I probably wanted to get to a certain point in the structure. Still, how I would get to that point would be very open. Now I actually don’t have a goal or place that I’m going to, I just explore.

You really embody the ‘placelessness’.

Maybe. I think before, it got very dense and ecstatic, it was a slow build. And then I consciously stopped using a fuzz pedal, or things that would allow me to get to that area, because I find that so much stuff these days is all about volume and physicality and it’s become a bit of a trope. A lot of the solo sets are a lot more quiet now, actually.

How do different collaborators affect the kind of mentality that you come into the session with?

It depends who it is. With Ghosted, for example, it’s like those guys are providing a canvas for me, in a way, to do my thing, or to explore. It’s kinda like what Jim O’Rourke and I do when we play with Haino. In a way, we kind of do that for him; like rolling out the red carpet for him to do his thing and hopefully we can enhance what he does and challenge him a bit, too. I think it’s very similar with Ghosted. Completely different music, but, they’re setting up the movie set; the lighting, etc. Which on the one hand is kind of a lot of pressure. I always feel like I need to constantly come up with stuff. And sometimes, beforehand, I’ll have a bit of self-doubt, and go ‘oh how can I do something that’s interesting without repeating myself…’ I get into my own head. But as soon as I start playing with them it always works and it’s always exciting, and we go places that are different every show. It’s fantastic. That’s a really kind of pleasurable, easy collaboration. Some other collabs, you just don’t really know. Generally it’s about getting along with the people that you’re working with, liking who they are, and wanting to hang out and be passionate.

I was wondering about this, specifically with Haino and O’Rourke, now that you’re more interested in quiet material…those are pretty loud records.

Yeah, it’s not always possible with Haino. Although sometimes it has been really quiet and introspective, it just depends. I’m interested in everything, the whole frequency spectrum and dynamics and quietness and something that’s very visceral. I’m into everything. One of the nice things about playing on your own [is that] there is a lot of pressure, everything’s on you, but there’s so much space and you can do anything with it, go anywhere, or just stop. Or take it slow. It’s different when you play with other people. But it’s really important for me to play with other people, because I find that when I work with other people, maybe because of the context, you get pushed into areas where you discover stuff about yourself, maybe because it’s a little bit uncomfortable…so it’s really important for me to continue collaborating.

Are you generally in a kind of flow-state when performing?

When it’s working, yeah. When it’s working I’m almost not thinking anymore, something’s just happening and sometimes I might go ‘wow, how is this happening?’ in that moment, but I try not to do that, because it usually jinxes you.

So how do you know when it’s not working and how do you try to steer it back to working?

There are times when I struggle and things aren’t flowing the way you want them to flow, and it’s hard sometimes—it really depresses me when that happens. You have to be really not anxious and not wound-up and try just to get into this calm state where you can let the music take you somewhere, hopefully. But it doesn’t always go that way. I’m always trying to get to a point where I’m reaching something that surprises me, and where there’s things happening and I don’t understand how it got to that point. If I don’t get that at a gig, then I’m bummed out.

Is it a lot of work to run Black Truffle? It’s just you and Crys?

It’s just me. Crys gives me a lot of advice and she’s a great sounding board, but yeah it’s just me. I have a manufacturing and distribution deal with a company in Cologne called Kompakt, who are an independent techno and electronic music company that’s been around forever. They never question me about what I’m releasing, but they’re very supportive. They do a lot of the dirty work; they pack the records, they get them out there, they deal with that stuff. I don’t have the time, or the space to do that.

I was gonna say, are you one of these people that just has like 50 sealed new records sitting in your apartment?

No. But I’ve got thousands of records in my apartment because I buy a lot of records.

Right, I read about that. Is that still the primary way that you listen to music?

Yeah.

How do you usually discover new stuff? Is it just through collaborators and going to shows?

It’s funny because a lot of the stuff I buy is usually older historical things that I’m discovering. You’re always connecting the dots, I’ve always done that, since I was very young—and wanting to know more and be surprised and just come into things. That’s one thing, and then, for example, at the moment I’m super into underground hip-hop from the U.S. That’s my own trip, I don’t really have any friends that are that into it, maybe a few but not as hardcore as me. 

I’m really into Armand Hammer. They’re great, I’ve seen them a few times. I really love the production on their records. And producers like Alchemist, and bigger names like Earl Sweatshirt, that kinda scene. But then I’m into a lot of Griselda stuff, Westside Gunn. Some of that stuff is so experimental, it’s insane. It’s not why I listen to it, but I love the fact that there’s just so much strange shit, weird choices and decisions, and clearly endless experimentation but it’s just a completely different context. I love that about rock music from the ‘60s and ‘70s too: how many levels you can listen to these pieces [on]. A classic rock record: it’s catchy, it’s a great song, etc. But then you’re like ‘oh wow they made this by doing that!’ Most people wouldn’t notice that or care, and it’s not the fundamental part of the piece, but it’s part of the architecture of how it was made. I like that.

I read that your first 7” was “Whole Lotta Love” [by Led Zeppelin]?

It was, yeah.

And then there was Hendrix, and then how the White Album had this crazy variety of stuff on it…That was a really good point because I’d often thought that about [the White album], but I never thought about it as the idea that you could encounter tape loops and sound collage on the same album that has these folk tunes and [pop songs].

Yeah, but even the actual pop tunes; a lot of the way those things were recorded were really experimental. They consciously thought ‘the drum sound on this track was really cool, but we can’t do that now on this track because we’ve already done it on the previous one, so how are we going to approach it on this track? Let’s turn all the highs on the EQ to maximum’, etc. Even though it’s just a pop song—doesn’t have a tape loop or anything like that—they’re still pushing what it is, every time. I think these days everything’s a bit more commodified. A lot of times you’ll go into a studio and the sound engineer will start mic-ing the drums, and they’ll mic the drums the way they always mic the drums, because they know that’s the way you mic the drums in the studio. In the Beatles’ recordings, especially from the mid-‘60s onwards, they consciously would do it differently every time, every track actually. So nothing’s fixed.

Do you also mic your drums differently every time?

I try to do different things every time, yeah. I can’t do the same record over and over again. I mean, I could but I choose not to.

Obviously it shows, every time a new one comes out and I put it on it’s like ‘whoa that’s completely out of left field’.

I just want to keep it interesting and challenging for me. After Hubris, which kind of went off a little bit, I could’ve made another Hubris, but [I decided] I can’t, so I made something quiet and different to Hubris immediately after. That’s the way I am.

Live Hubris was my introduction to your stuff, that was really exciting to hear.

That one was really fun to do live, so much fun. It was one of those gigs where I had a smile on my face, because it was just insane. It was exactly what I wanted.

Do you ever do gigs that aren’t recorded that you really regret [weren’t recorded] afterwards?

Most. Not everything is recorded, I’m very lucky that [Live Hubris] was recorded. Yeah a lot of the best gigs I’ve done, I’m sure, are just a distant memory in my head. But that’s fine. That’s the way it goes.

When you think about sound, before you start playing—you said sometimes you have a motif that you’ll fall back on—do you have a motif [as in] a pre-planned kind of riff or is it a motif that you find in that performance?

Both. When I say motif, it literally might be one note that’s tolling like a bell every thirty seconds, and that’s it. Almost like a raga, where there’s a tamboura drone and somebody improvising on top of it. It’s like a catalyst to explore. And that’s what I’m looking for when I play solo. If it’s too pre-planned and fixed, then it’s almost like playback or something. It’s just gotta be really simple, enough to elicit something, just to get me going.

How did you get from ‘60s rock to a raga drone approach? What was the point at which you really understood music in this more temporal sense?  

I think that was from working with Keith Rowe, from AMM, we used to do a lot of guitar duets, in the early 2000s. It was completely abstract, what we were doing. I wouldn’t compare it to Indian raga or anything like that, but he had this idea of music as a landscape, and how we look at time, and extended durations, allowing things to really unfold over a long period of time. And the idea of juxtaposition, different things that were ‘unrelated’ juxtaposed together in creating a new sound world that’s sort of this ‘other’ sound world. Working with him was a big inspiration for me; dealing with things that took a long time to unfold—or not unfold. Then being inspired by composers like Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier, who I ended up working with extensively.

You also put out records of Lucier’s, right?

Yeah, but I worked with him quite extensively as a player the last ten years of his life. A lot of his pieces take a long time to unfold, they’re very slow moving. They were a big inspiration for me. But I think the Indian thing, mixed with my background, growing up listening to a lot of jazz improvisation, that’s also very big for me.

[Did you have] much important influence from other art mediums?

Oh, of course, like film. It’s pretty huge for me. That would be the first thing I would think about. It’s funny, a lot of the film that I really love is also very slow…kind of mundane in a way. Nothing’s really happening. You’re thrown into this thing that’s almost like a real time, daily life document. And then you step away from it. At the same time, it has this sort of magical feeling about it. 

Can I ask about specific filmmakers?

I love Tsai Ming-liang, the Malaysian director. I really love his films. I mean, I was super into Cassavetes when I was growing up. That was just the biggest revelation for me because it was so real. And a lot of Hollywood films spoon-feed the audience where there’s a lot of assumptions about a character or how something develops. If you jump from one scene to another, you sort of go, okay, between these two scenes, this is probably what happened.

But we’re not going to see that. Whereas with him, there were these extended scenes, between two people talking or arguing or trying to work something out. And it felt like you were there. And all the characters were really three-dimensional.

They were unpredictable, just like we’re unpredictable. And that was just so unbelievable for me as an 18-year-old, to see stuff like that.

I had a similar thing growing up with the story you told about the drums, that you wanted to play drums first, and then your dad was like, ‘pick a real instrument’, and then you can come back to it. I mean, he made you go with piano, or did you choose piano?

No, he made me. And it was very short-lived. It felt like an eternity, but it was probably a year, [lessons] once a week for a year. So, you know, what I learned was really rudimentary.

And did you approach it percussively at all?

No, I think I was just listening to the piano teacher and doing what I was told. And it was probably super boring. All I was thinking about was drums, you know, and then eventually, I got my hands on a drum kit. And my parents were pretty cool [about it], considering I had the drum kit in my bedroom. It wasn’t a very big bedroom, but… I used to play all the time, and they were very, very patient.

Was there any cultural influence in your playing from an early age? From your family, I mean; you’re Iraqi?

Yeah, I heard a lot of Middle Eastern music growing up, and obviously it’s super percussive. Maybe in retrospect, it had some sort of influence on me, I don’t know. I was really lucky to be in the household with a record collection, with a really wide variety of music, all kinds of stuff. Stuff like that, but then all the ’70s rock records that were happening at the time, and jazz records, just all kinds of stuff. There was always music [playing] in the house when I was growing up. And my grandfather had a second-hand shop, and there were records there, and gear as well.

Your first drum kit came from there.

It did, and effect pedals and reel-to-reel machines and records. Records are definitely my education. And going to gigs. Those two things.

Coming back to records as your main means of listening to music, I don’t know, it’s been hard for me lately not to just be depressed about the state of things: bandcamp being bought out, and then Spotify announcing there won’t be any royalties for 30 second plays, or for smaller artists. Stop me if this is, you know, way beyond something you really want to talk about, but like, how do you imagine the proliferation of music going forward, and especially in terms of how musicians can earn a living, is it possible from anything other than just continuously playing gigs and selling records?

It’s depressing. I mean, I’ve only made a living from playing gigs, pretty much. Once in a while I might get a royalty, and it’s just like a nice surprise.

From being on a soundtrack?

Even from making records. I just got some money from Drag City yesterday, and it wasn’t a lot, definitely not enough to live off by any means, but it was a nice surprise. I have gigs, that’s how I survive, and it’s stressful to live that way, where you’re just waiting for the invitation, you know?

And always traveling.

And the traveling, that takes a toll, yeah, for sure. I’m really old school, I just love records, but I know that no one buys them anymore. I know from running a label that it’s really super niche now.

There’s just a small amount of people that buy records and in a way the digital purchases allow the physical purchases to exist these days. I kind of look at the trio with Haino and Jim, the quantities that we sold on a release 10 years ago compared to now. It’s kind of pitiful, like seriously, it’s not what it used to be. Yeah I find it depressing, but I’m just in my own little fantasy world where I like records, and just assume that everyone thinks the same way as me, but they don’t.

Yeah, but I mean you kind of have to think like that to keep the thing alive.

I mean people always talk about ‘there’s a vinyl revival…’

Right, like for Taylor Swift and re-presses of AC/DC…

Yeah, a thousand times, although I do like AC/DC. But on the other hand, you see that people are actually buying vinyl and there’s all this interest, but actually when you look at it, when you look at the numbers, it’s not that… It’s going down for sure. What are you going to do? It’s going to shift into something else. I’m not sure what.

With gigs and waiting for invitations, is there an element of always reaching out to your contacts? [Or do] you really just have to wait?

I’m not a professional artist. I’m not a pushy business guy. I’m just not. Probably to my own detriment. I have friends that are much more on the case with stuff like that and they really push their work out there. I mean I’m really lucky that people are interested in what I do and I get invited to play. I’m super thankful.

I do have a booking agent. She’s probably hustling for me. I don’t have to do that. I mean I hate the idea of selling myself. I’m lucky. I’m in a good position, and maybe if I was younger, no one would be interested. Maybe because I’m a little bit older and I was a little bit more established before things really shifted, maybe I’m benefiting from that. But who knows?

You just never know. All I want to do is play and make music and just keep hopefully challenging myself and reaching new levels in what I do. Thankfully some people are interested.

When was the last time you played in Berlin?

I played with Arnold Dreyblatt a month and a half ago. We made a record for Drag City, his new record, Resolve. He had a last-minute album launch in [the Berlin district of] Wedding, and did a free show.

And before that?

There was a Black Truffle night. We did a two or three day Black Truffle festival at arkaoda last December. And we did Hubris. It’s the second time we’ve ever done Hubris live, and that was crazy because I had Will Guthrie and Tony Buck on drums. 

Will you do another Black Truffle thing like that?

If someone asked me to, I’d love to. I used to put on a festival in Australia for like 10 years with a close friend, in three different cities for 10 years. It became quite big, [but] we both got totally burnt out after a while. We brought Pan Sonic to Australia for the first time, Fushitsusha, Whitehouse, Voice Crack, Kevin Drumm. All kinds of stuff. I wish a festival would say, ‘hey, do you want to put on shit for a week?’ I’d gladly do that. Gladly.

What was your festival called?

The What Is Music Festival. Yeah, we started it when we were 23, 24.

Do you feel like there’s still that possibility? For someone who is 23 now in Australia to start something similar? Or is that a thing of the past?

I think it’s a possibility. We’re very lucky because we had just played with John Zorn when we were 23. He asked me to play his piece, “Cobra”, which I learnt from and played with him in New York. And then I said to him, ‘hey, would you be cool with me doing this in Australia with an Australian ensemble?’ And he said, ‘no problem.’ 

So we went to a club [in Australia] and approached them with this idea. The guy was super interested and then he said, ‘oh, why don’t we do three or four nights and you can put on some other stuff?’ It just became a festival, and it got bigger and bigger. Then we started to do it in Melbourne and Sydney, [and eventually extended to] Brisbane.

It got really big internationally—not to mention the biggest experimental music festival in Australia for some years—but we paid for the whole thing ourselves, on our credit cards. We did everything from picking people up at the airport to running sound checks…we did everything. Just the two of us. And it really took its toll. We had a lot of energy [back then], and it was fun.

Did it pay for itself?

Sometimes we lost money. But generally, we never lived off it or made money, but everyone kind of got paid and people were sort of happy.

Were you living off your music already at that time?

No, no. I had day jobs. I had jobs in record stores, all kinds of stuff. Later I was teaching in a university a bit.

Teaching music?

Not exactly. I had a film class. I had this crazy opportunity to teach at a university in Melbourne, and there was a department called the Centre for Ideas. They invited me to talk about my work.

When I finished, the head of the department said to me, ‘do you want to work here?’ I said, ‘what do you mean? I’ve never gone to university. I don’t have a degree.’ She said ‘that’s fine, you’re a practitioner.’ I asked, ‘what do you want me to teach?’ And she said, ‘oh, whatever you want, you can make up your own classes.’ Then I said, ‘but you know, I’m touring all the time and I’m away a lot.’ And she said, ‘yeah, you’re a practitioner. That’s fine.’

I ended up working there for five years. Not full-time. The most I had was like four classes in a semester. That was pretty interesting. I’ve had all kinds of jobs. Then slowly things started to [dry up], and I found myself […] coming to Europe all the time. Most of the money I was making was in Europe and I was paying rent in Australia. Then all of my day jobs just sort of stopped for various reasons. And I was put into this position where I was like, ‘can I, do you think I can, you can do this? Like just continue playing?’ and somehow I’ve managed to do that since then. That would have been 15 years ago, maybe? It was very scary.

Because growing up, I was always told that it wasn’t possible. That was drummed into my head, that it was a hobby. And I still have that hangup. My partner makes fun of me a lot. She says, ‘you always run the label and navigate your life like you’re getting away with something and it’s not going to last.’ That’s kind of true. Like I always think someone’s going to pull the plug at some point and go, ‘No, you can’t do this. What are you doing?’ And you know, whereas, yeah, here everyone’s just doing it. It’s normal.

Yeah. Is your partner doing music full time?

Yeah. And it’s actually very challenging for her because she’s never done that full time before. She ran a festival in Canada, which is how we met. She invited me to play there years ago. And she sort of had that as a… it wasn’t like she couldn’t live off it, but it was enough to cushion, just to give her a bit of stability. And since we moved here, she’s stopped that. And it’s very challenging for her. It’s a really stressful way to live.

But…I couldn’t imagine getting a job. I’m very lucky. Even though we live incredibly modestly, we’re still very thankful.

Apart from the records. Biggest part of the budget, I’m sure.

Yeah, apart from the habit. I just picked up a record.

Oh yeah? What did you get?

It’s probably a hip hop record. I don’t know what it is. It came from the U.S. I just had to pay tax on it. I hate that.

Can I ask what were some of the films in your curriculum?

Oh, so I had a class called Film as Subversive Art, named after the book. But it was just a catalyst for me to show… I always hated how in a lot of university classes, how people would just talk about a film or show an excerpt from a scene. 

So I was like, I want to show them the film. They’re going to sit through a whole film once every week and then we’ll talk about it. And then at the end of the semester, they have to pick one of the films and write about their connection, why it spoke to them. It’s a pretty easy class in a way. They just literally have to watch the film. And the films that I chose, yeah, all kinds of stuff. Fassbinder, Robert Downey films, like, Greaser’s Palace, I showed them that. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. Robert Downey, not Robert Downey Jr.

I’ve seen Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight. [aka Moment to Moment]

That’s a crazy film. You should check out Greaser’s Palace. It’s amazing. I think I showed them The Hole [directed by] Tsai Ming-liang. I definitely showed them a Cassavetes or two. Um, probably some Herzog, some Bresson. I think I showed them Sweet Movie, which I probably couldn’t do these days. I really pushed the envelope a bit. It was a bit uncomfortable. Hopefully it turned them on to stuff.

Because they weren’t film students?

No; The Centre for Ideas was within this big, big, [institution], it was called Victoria College of the Arts. So, there were students who studied music there, either jazz or repertoire. There were fine art students, drama students, dancers, sculptors, musical theater. They all had their own classes, but for one or two days a week, there’d be a couple of classes under the umbrella of the Centre for Ideas. And all of them from all the different disciplines would be thrown together in a class, in a weirdo class, like mine. And a lot of the teachers from their departments hated our department, because they were like, ‘why are you doing that? It’s a waste of time.’

Were the students generally pretty receptive?

A lot of the music students were not receptive at all. They were the worst. They’re usually the dumbest and most uninteresting students, because they’re just fixated on their instrument and getting better at it. Sometimes I would have sound-related exercises or assessments. And the fine art students were always much more interesting than the music students when it came to sound. Always. Which is pretty interesting, but not surprising in a way. They were much more open.

Anyway, they’re all thrown together. Some of them loved it, because when you’re out in the world doing this stuff, often—like I’ve done music for theater productions and drama and dance here and there, and you’re thrown together with people from different disciplines and you’re kind of working together on a project and it’s good to be pretty open-minded.

And it’s actually quite interesting to meet people who are in a different discipline to what you do. But a lot of younger students just didn’t want to know about that. Some were super into it. It was sort of 50-50.

Have you considered approaching universities here at all, or have you [already]?

I haven’t. No. I’ve done guest lectures at CalArts and a few places around the world. But not here. I’d be open to it. But I hated the whole bureaucracy and just the… a lot of people that have worked in that sort of environment for most of their adult life. They’ve got their territory and I don’t want to know about that shit. I would sort of step in and get out of there. I understand all these people are trying to hold onto their piece of the pie.

And [teaching is] exhausting because you’re kind of constantly giving people stuff. I’m not precious. I mean, a lot of this stuff, I sort of had to fight for it to find out what it was and get a hold of it and absorb it. And, you know, especially pre-internet, it was really tough to find this information. So a lot of times you’re sort of talking and giving over all this stuff, and if you’re not getting any energy back it’s really exhausting. I mean, some students would complain because the film had subtitles. And I’d be like, all I’m asking you to do is sit and watch a movie. And they would be put out. That kind of thing would really deter me from wanting to do that.

Understandable. Because I’m a Loren Connors obsessive, can I ask just kind of about that experience of working together?

Yeah. I mean, he’s amazing. So important and special. Don’t remember how that happened. Maybe ISSUE Project Room proposed it and he was up for it. I remember when I agreed, I was very excited, of course, because I’m a big fan.

When did you first hear his music?


I would have heard his music in the early ’90s, just from mail order, Forced Exposure and things like that, when he was, maybe he was known as Guitar Roberts in those days. And of course I’m interested in guitar.

So you just ordered it.

Exactly.

It’s so hard for me to imagine that kind of…I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s obviously very exciting that you would just blindly order something…

Yeah. It was so exciting, especially in Australia. You could read two sentences in a mail order catalog and a lot of them were very oblique and out there, and I’d have to go to the post office, get a money order and then send it away and then maybe two months later, this package would arrive and you’d open it and go, ‘what was this?’ And sometimes it was amazing and sometimes it was like, eh. But it was very exciting.

That’s how I discovered his work. And I do remember Jim [O’Rourke] writing to me when he heard that I was doing a duo with Loren and Jim said to me, ‘Listen, I want to give you some advice. Don’t try and follow what he does. Don’t,’ he said, ‘that’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll fall into a vortex and never get out.’

I took that advice and I kind of stepped into it thinking, okay, I’m just going to do my thing and he can do his thing and it kind of worked. But it was really special to play with him.

How did you and Jim O’Rourke first meet and start collaborating?

We’d met in the ’90s, but it was very brief. I don’t think he even remembers. I was in a record store, of course, in New York. It was an experimental store. He walked in and the guy running the store sort of grabbed him and grabbed me and said, you guys need to meet. Jim was quite polite and he said, ‘Oh, what are you doing? What are you playing?’ I said, ‘I’m playing with John Zorn on the weekend.’ And then Jim said, ‘do you think I can play too?’

I was like, ‘that would be amazing. I’ll ask him,’ and I don’t remember what happened, but Jim didn’t play. [On] that same trip, I was walking down the street and I had a Merzbow Rainbow Electronics 2 t-shirt on. That was a thing Jim had put out on Dexter’s Cigar, which was his label—his first label, I think. As I was walking down the street, I heard someone yell from across the road, ‘We only sold two of those!’ or something like that. And it was him. I told him both of these things and he just had no recollection of that. Years later, I was in Tokyo…

You didn’t cross the street or anything when he yelled?

No, I was going somewhere and he was going somewhere. And the weird thing was: that same day, I was sitting on the subway and Lou Reed was sitting right opposite me. It was very weird. Who I also ended up working with, I worked with Lou Reed once.

Really? I didn’t know that.

There was a festival in Australia that him and Laurie Anderson curated and I played at it, and we played together and stuff. It was very bizarre.

Is that recorded?

No, I didn’t think it was recorded.

Then Sonic Youth played in Australia and they invited me to hang out backstage. And I met [Jim] there in Sydney.

Was he playing in the band?

He was in the band, yeah. This [was] years after I met him the first few times.

So then, that was in Sydney, where I’m from. I was living in Melbourne, but I happened to be in Sydney that night. So then about five days later, I was in Melbourne and I was walking down the street and who walks right up to me? Jim O’Rourke. He was like, ‘hey man, what are you doing? Let’s hang out.’ At that point in time, I was starting a record store and I had to go back to it. And so I said, do you want to come with me? And he came with me. And in the record store, the only stock we had was ECM.

We had nothing else because it was just starting and that was the first shipment that we got.  He’s a huge ECM fan and I am too from growing up, so we just nerded out all afternoon on records we listened to as teenagers. That was really fun. Then I went to the second Sonic Youth gig in Melbourne and then we hung out there. We just clicked.

And then soon after that, I was in Tokyo. I think Jim can also be a little suspicious because people always kind of take advantage of him. I think he’s just a bit jaded from that.

I saw him in Tokyo and he was, I think he was looking like, ‘who is this guy again?’ Even though we’d hung out. And I had a record bag. I’d gone shopping that day and he wanted to see what I’d bought. And I kind of hit the jackpot with him because I had a really rare Luc Ferrari record. He’s a huge fan. I had a rare—although I can’t recall the name—Greek female vocalist from the ’80s, very experimental. Super amazing. A lot of that stuff’s been reissued recently. I’m blanking.

Anyway, he was like, oh, that record is awesome. And then, I don’t remember what the third record was, but he was like, ‘okay, this guy’s okay.’ So then he said, ‘do you want to have dinner?’ And then we just yapped for hours and hours. We just became friends, and then we started playing together.

I mean, he’s on another level. Like he’s fucking incredible, an incredible guy to work with and just super knowledgeable and always pushing himself. And yeah, I really admire him.

He’s super fun. We’re the same age. We kind of have a lot of the same experiences with things growing up in certain records and [our] tastes are very similar in a way. He’s a very good friend, we’re in touch regularly.

I just played in Prague and his partner, Eiko [Ishibashi], we shared the bill a few days ago. So it was really nice. She’s amazing. I remember when just before they started seeing each other, I was in Tokyo and he said, ‘hey, come with me to Tower Records. A friend of mine is doing this in-store.’ And she’d only had one, maybe two CDs out in Japan. And she was playing acoustic guitar and singing. And he told me that she’d taught herself how to play guitar like a few weeks before. So I was sort of sitting and watching this thing. Just this folky pop, [these] really interesting songs, [asking myself] ‘Who the hell is this?’ Soon after that they got together. I’ve seen her music become phenomenal over the last 10, 15 years, from that Tower Records in-store thing. Pretty amazing.

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Maximilien Luc Proctor (MLP) is a French-American filmmaker, the founder of Ultra Dogme and the avant-garde instructor at Berlin’s Art on the Run filmschool.

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