Ultramarine Signals Into Space
Ultramarine have always seemed to exist slightly outside their time. Their 1989 debut EP, Wyndham Lewis, incorporated recordings of the work of Lewis, the futurist painter and writer who died three decades earlier. And where their first album, 1990s Folk,
Ultramarine have always seemed to exist slightly outside their time. Their 1989 debut EP, Wyndham Lewis, incorporated recordings of the work of Lewis, the futurist painter and writer who died three decades earlier. And where their first album, 1990s Folk, bore certain hallmarks of its eraa mix of breakbeats, funk bass, and keening saxophone, embedded within groove-heavy, sampledelic post-punksubsequent albums ventured further afield. Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper made good on the promise of what Simon Reynolds called pastoral techno: an unorthodox fusion of sleek machine funk with woolly jazz, wonky soul, and occasional vocals from Robert Wyatt, an iconoclastic legend of the Canterbury scene. Signals Into Space, only their second album in two decades, distills elements that have always been present in Ultramarines music into a potent new brew.
Their sound is more refined than ever, but its hard to put your finger on what, exactly, that sound is. Warm, liquid synths and gently pulsing grooves scan as ambient, but vintage drum machines add teeth. The tone of the electric bass, muscular but understated, flashes to Tortoises spacious brand of post-rock. The watercolor wash of Ric Elsworths vibraphone and the searching saxophone of Iain Ballamy (a member of the group Food, with multiple albums for ECM and Rune Grammofon to his name) nod to ethereal jazz. The most fitting tag might be Balearic, given the albums drowsy drift; theres even a sample of a 1983 song by Orquesta de las Nubes, Suso Sizs balmily experimental Spanish group. Ultramarine call Signals Into Spacecomposed in a small, windowless room in an industrial complex in their native Essexan escapist record. But its no mere pastiche of palm trees and Mediterranean tides. Its effects are more complex, even contradictorya picture of white-sand beaches superimposed on dull cement walls, a dream of summer bundled in heavy down. Atmospheric and skeletal, their music projects outward yet turns inward.
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