Other Girl (Tape)

"Thriving in the dust and shadows for the second time this year, Ulla serves up a glistening companion to the gauzy 'Hometown Girl' - a heart-stopping suite of homestead hymns that ooze over the established timeline, muddling Jazz, Americana, classical minimalism, post-punk, sound art, and slowcore into the most beautiful thing, very highly recommended if you’re into anything from Eliana Glass, to Vincent Gallo, Alan Lomax, Craig Leon, or Billie Holiday.

You could reason that Ulla's been floating in this direction since the very beginning of their career. Although they were lumped in with the neue ambient welle, placed alongside Huerco S, Malibu and Berlin's ketamized Kwia clique, there's always been a woody aroma of Americana burning in the basement. Even at their dubbiest, Ulla managed to trap soundscapes in tangible physical space, making their work feel diaristic but also critical, imagining a new horizon of American DIY avant-garde music that readily acknowledged its analog history. January's 'Hometown Girl', the first release under the U.e. moniker, sounded like an artist engaging with pure instinct, conjuring a rickety acoustic jazz-phantasy, willed into being.

God is in the details and Ulla's self-consciously "lo-fi" process situates the record aesthetically in a lineage that snakes back thru hypnagogic pop, New Weird America, smog's hermetic indie, the '70s private press scene, all the way to Alan Lomax's ethnographic recordings. Imagining their own canon, Ulla dubs acoustic sketches that stitch a rough autobiography, burying cryptic references behind sonic illusions. The stumbling tempo gives the impression that the album's opening track is a Vincent Gallo-like approximation of pre-Motown soul until Ulla's voice, filtered out to isolate its most exposed top-end croaks, transports us to the Midwest sometime in 1999.

When more contemporary elements breach the frame on 'Weird Door', they're approached with the same logic. Ulla's faded treatments might just as well be wax cylinder rotations, their AutoTuned voice linking wistful old folk musics to modern country. There's even a trace of Craig Leon's milestone Takoma outlier 'Nommos' on 'Dipped in Paint', when Ulla loops at slow, steady machine pulse underneath emotive horn improvisations. As the record unfolds, its intricacy reveals itself: the dictaphone-fuelled gorgeousness of 'Baggy' that plays like 'Amazing Grace' reworked by Basinski, or 'Scribble', a vortex of lush elasticated Downtown-style instrumentation that's mirrored by the decayed, minute-long 'Low Melody'. Even the Satie-inspired 'Slow Duck' sounds as if it's been stripped of its salon airs and graces and resprayed in American gothic hues.

At a time when American history is being rewritten in real time, Ulla provides a hazy corrective, weaving a personal tapestry that feels so concrete that it almost hurts. Just, stunning."

- Boomkat