Adventurous musicians don’t attract many stalkers, so it’s unlikely that Australian guitarist and audio artist Oren Ambarchi would mind if I let skip his Skype name. Or maybe he would, so let’s make a game of it.

On first hearing, you’d think Ambarchi’s online handle had been ripped from the pages of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius, but it wasn’t. Instead, it’s the nom de plume a certain hammer-of-the-gods rock guitarist opted to use when he played on folk-rock cult hero Roy Harper’s 1971 release, Stormcock.

You wouldn’t think Ambarchi would be a fan of the singer-songwriter genre, but he begs to differ.

“I love the Stormcock record,” he reveals in a Skype interview from Los Angeles. “It’s just beautifully recorded and played. It’s a special record. And there are a few things that I’ve released that have pop-song–based structures, with vocals and stuff like that.”

What he and Canadian-born audio explorer Crys Cole will get up to when they headline Quiet City, an ambient-music series hosted by VIVO Media Arts, is likely to be quite different—and listening to the pair’s first full-length, Sonja Henies vei 31, isn’t going to be a lot of help, either.

“That record is not what we do live,” Ambarchi stresses. “It’s almost like an audio diary of a week that we spent in Norway, near Oslo. A lot of it is field recordings—blurry recordings of stuff that was going on in our lives at that point. It’s kind of like a collage; it’s quite abstract.…A lot of the recorded projects that we both do, we’re interested in venturing into different areas that we wouldn’t necessarily do live, so that’s just an example of that. Live is one thing, and then there are so many other possibilities when you do studio work.”

Sliding over to Ambarchi’s laptop, Cole explains that while her musical partner uses the guitar as a sound source—lately, he’s taken to amplifying it though a Leslie rotating speaker, which brings a swooshing, three-dimensional physicality to the mix—she’s more likely to use small sounds, including her voice, picked up and processed through grainy contact microphones.

“It’s more of a textural approach,” she says, “but I’m starting to bring in some tonal stuff, which is why I have a keyboard as well. I’m using this rickety, crappy little Casio keyboard to generate sounds that then intermingle in a very interesting way with his tones. That’s one facet of the duo that we’ve been exploring a lot more in our live gigs.”

Beyond that, even Ambarchi and Cole don’t have a fixed idea of what they’ll do on Thursday night.

“That’s kind of part of the fun: trying to approach it in a fresh way each time,” says the former. “On one hand, you do kind of hone what you’re doing, and you have an understanding of how to manipulate your materials. But on the other hand, we both really get off on this element of surprise and chaos, in a way—trying to harness things that are chaotic and things that happen by chance. That can be really exciting and stimulating.”

And beautiful too, Cole suggests. “It’s not aggressive, what we’re doing, at all,” she says. “It’s something people can really get drawn into.”

Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole headline Quiet City at VIVO Media Arts on Thursday (March 26).