After decades of records that pile up layers, collaborators and long shifting structures, Oren Ambarchi goes the opposite way. Prophetic Perfect Tense, on Kou Records, is solo guitar: two sides, two single takes, minimal effects, recorded on a Telefunken 24-track machine at Studio Dede in Tokyo on 7 and 8 January 2026 and produced by Randall Dunn, with whom Ambarchi had first worked on Sunn O)))'s Monoliths & Dimensions. In his own words, the most conventionally guitar-sounding record he has ever made.

The models he had in mind were João Gilberto's 1973 'white album' and Alemu Aga's bägänna recordings, records whose whole atmosphere comes from a player and a room. What came out is stranger and warmer: a loose circling figure, closer to the blues than anything else in his catalogue, which Ambarchi describes as an abstracted John Lee Hooker shuffle on a broken Fender Rhodes. Dunn set up a Leslie cabinet, a Fender Twin and an Ampeg B-15 before the session, and the room is very present: amp hum, fret noise, the clicks of the Leslie pedal, strings scraping the table are all left in.

The only addition is a single guitar overdub in the middle of side A and at the start and end of side B, which Dunn convinced him to record after Ambarchi had declared the session finished. Mastered by Ben Greenberg, cut by Paul Gold, cover artwork from Kazuko Miyamoto's 1977 string constructions.