It may only contain five tracks, but ‘Shade Themes from Kairos’ is most certainly not an EP with a running time of well over an hour: time enough for the three collaborators all renowned in their own rights (Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O’Malley, and Randall Dunn), to forge some powerful atmospherics, while intertwining elements of their own characteristic styles to create something altogether different.
It’s a strange, shifting landscape that ‘Shade Themes’ conjures; too rhythmic and intrusive to be ambient, too indirect to be considered a song-focused set, the tracks bleed from one to the next via a succession of eerie quiet passages that build to cacophonous rhythms and mountainous screeds of feedback, discord and noise.
Oren Ambarchi, who in addition to his solo output performs with Sunn O))) and Burial Chamber, is a master of texture; Randall Dunn, as a founder of the enigmatic Master Musicians of Bukkake is a guru of the esoteric and the strange, and Sunn O))) main man Stephen O’Malley is a deity of the underworld when it comes to the earth-shatteringly slow and heavy. ‘ Shade Themes’ incorporates all of these elements and more to forge something
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The Drag City website describes the album as ‘Epic, insistent collabasitions played out over four sides making a whole’, and it does seem fair reflection of the way each of the three artists pulls the material in different directions. It isn’t until the 21-minute ‘Ebony Pagoda’ that the immense, drawn-out drone guitar notes that typify O’Malley’s output appear. It provides the perfect finale to a musical journey that never fails to confound the listener’s expectations, or to stimulate the senses and is more than worthy of being described as ‘epic’.
Ambarchi, O’Malley, Dunn Online
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