about the record

With Dragon’s Return, Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi and Norwegian guitarist Fredrik Rasten create a meditative score for Eduard Grečner’s eponymous 1967 Slovak cult film, a stark black-and-white parable that unfolds like a myth carved in stone. The album captures a unique live performance recorded at the Videodroom Festival during Film Fest Ghent in October 2024, where this new score was premiered alongside the film in collaboration with the Slovak Film Institute. What began as a fleeting improvisational encounter between sound and image has since taken on a life of its own as an evocative, hypnotic sound world that retains its power even in the absence of visuals.

Rather than simply accompanying the images, Ambarchi and Rasten seem to speak through them. Their interplay on guitars, flutes, percussion, and voice unfolds slowly, without a fixed destination, culminating in a subtle, entrancing sound world. With few breaks or ruptures, this trippy, folk-inflected continuous composition invites surrender.

Rasten’s 12-string guitar and delicate use of voice create layered textures that shimmer and shift. Ambarchi, known for his electro-acoustic work, explores a radically softer mode here, strumming, bowing, and coaxing tones from his instrument as though it were a string section unto itself. He blows into shells, adding breath and texture to the sonic palette and touching on something elemental.

Together, they evoke a sound world that feels both ritualistic and strangely familiar, as if echoing from a forgotten ceremony or dreamed into being after hearing an old folk tale. The music speaks in tones both intimate and expansive, shaped live in dialogue with the film and with each other, with only minimal overdubs added afterward.