Kind Regards Oren Ambarchi & Eric Thielemans

Kind Regards is the second duo release from guitarist Oren Ambarchi and drummer Eric Thielemans, out via AD 93 on the 21st February. 

The record captures an expansive performance in Poitiers, France in November 2023. First  working together in an unpredictable trio with minimalist legend and eccentric extraordinaire  Charlemagne Palestine, Ambarchi and Thielemans quickly established a remarkable musical  chemistry that led to an ongoing series of duo concerts, including the performance documented  on their LP Double Consciousness (Matière Mémorie, 2023).  

Kind Regards finds the duo refining their shared language while continuing to take risks,  allowing the music’s gravitational pull to lead them from meditative calm to unexpectedly  expressive passages of melodic invention and rhythmic drive. 

Recorded in sparkling fidelity and carefully mixed by Ambarchi’s longtime collaborator Joe Talia,  the LP contains a single unbroken performance, stretching out for over 45 minutes. Guitar and  drums weave together into a symbiotic whole that nevertheless affords us ample opportunity to  marvel at the highly personal approaches these two musicians have developed to their chosen  instruments through decades of diverse collaboration and prolific performance. The set begins  with Thielemans’ hypnotic tom patterns, around which Ambarchi’s wavering, shimmering guitar  tones—achieved with the help of the rotating speaker of a Leslie cabinet—flurry and swirl.  Thielemans’ drums play subtle tricks with time and perception, adding and dropping beats within  repeated patterns to create an effect at once rhythmically insistent and liquified. Growing at first  into a rapidly pulsing texture of brushed drums and flickering harmonics, the music builds momentum into an irregular groove over which Ambarchi’s guitar is transformed into haunting,  monumental electric organ chords, strikingly recalling the Wurlitzer work of Alice Coltrane,  before settling into a section of gentle portamento melody embedded into the tactile clicks and  clangs of Thielemans’ percussion. 

When Thielemans adopts a more traditional jazz approach to the kit in some of the set’s second  half, the results are stunning, demonstrating a feel for shifting accents and sensibility to the  touch of the stick on the drum or cymbal that recalls greats like Jack DeJohnette or Billy Hart  (one of Thielemans’ mentors). And when Ambarchi turns up the heat, he does so in an  unexpected and delightful way, letting loose a swarm of jittering delayed tones straight out of  Henry Kaiser’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life, with a more active use of the guitar’s fretboard than his usual approach to the instrument allows. As the performance draws to a close after a climactic episode of distorted harmonic groans and crashing cymbals that manages to be at  once thunderous and carefully attuned to detail, it is clearer than ever that, for these two serial collaborators, this is a very special pairing. 

Kind Regards shows us the kind of magic that can happen when two masters who have dedicated decades to reimagining their instruments simply begin to play, following the music wherever it goes.