Charlemagne Palestine teams with Ambarchi and O'Sullivan on new album

Minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine has teamed up with guitarist Oren Ambarchi and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan for a new collaborative album, KKKAAARRREEENNNIIINNNAAA.

Consisting of one extended piece, the record captures a May 2025 live performance the three artists gave together at London's Cafe OTO. The set saw the trio reimagine Karenina, a key vocal work Palestine originally recorded in Paris in March 1997, transforming a decades-old solo piece into a fully collaborative performance.

In the reworked version, O'Sullivan controls three cassette machines playing the original 1997 recording while also playing viola and synths and adding live vocals. Ambarchi contributes guitar, and Palestine adds his own live voice and keyboard, layering three distinct musical voices over the original tape in real time rather than simply covering or sampling it.

The collaboration brings together three of experimental music's most established figures: Palestine has been a fixture of New York's minimalist scene since the 1960s, Ambarchi has built a career spanning solo work and collaborations with artists including Sunn O))) and Fire!, and O'Sullivan is known for his work fronting the group Ulver and collaborating widely across the UK's experimental scene.

KKKAAARRREEENNNIIINNNAAA arrives September 11 via Black Truffle, extending a lineage of one-off, performance-based recordings that has defined much of Palestine's catalog since he began recording nearly six decades ago. Ambarchi's busy year of collaborative work also includes a trio album with Christer Bothen, while the release lands alongside other boundary-pushing experimental albums like The Body and Cel Genesis's debut collaboration.