"Straus’ knack for skittering fungified concrete, croaks of ring modulation and the unwieldy resonances of dropped equipment skirt Fukuzumi’s redacted downtuned plinths, in a semi-lucid diorama of abandoned truckstop melancholy"
LA’s Motion Ward brings us this enmeshed collaborative recording from two notable label associates, pairing Kanagawa-based guitarist and producer Kouhei Fukuzumi as Ultrafog with contemporary underground hero of temperate minimalism, Philadelphia’s Ulla E. Straus.
Across myriad releases for West Mineral Ltd, Boomkat Editions and Motion Ward both solo and in collaboration (see her duo with Pontiac Streator and landmark collaborative recordings with Perila, ‘Blue Heater’ and ‘LOG ET3RNAL’), Ulla’s work is undeniably influential in recent years. Straus and Perila’s warmly coy jumble of fascinated concrete assembly and enveloping electronics has powerfully derailed a steady course through plateaus where millennial ambient music seemed to be settling a decade ago.
More directly, an often male dominated timeline, obsessed with falsified or revisionist ideas about trite sentimentality and unimaginative compositional retreads, respectfully perpetrated by continuously re-adhering shinier layers to the wallpaper which Eno once asked us to stare at. Whilst his immersive epiphanies provided an epochal popular reassessment of music’s purpose, this simple notion and its listening directives emerged now close to half a century ago.
Fukuzumi’s work both self-released and via Angoisse, c- and again Motion Ward quietly trundles along a committed mainline, steeped in sombre yet uncategorisable aesthetics and the porous edges of his uneasy melodic objects. The Venn diagram of these collaborators makes perfect sense as ‘It Means A Lot’, sharing a joyful mutual understanding of youth, shyness and memory – the immediacy of track titles in lower case as though absently texted or scrawled on a classroom desk, the careful spaces and hues we must inhabit whilst listening to them, the earnestness of the album title itself.
It’s worth noting right away the constant presence of processed and played guitar sounds throughout ‘It Means A Lot’ – earnestly tethering this buoyant, unrushed music to an early 2000s heyday of electronic exploration within a context of what came to be blanketed as ‘post-rock’. Treated guitars and vocal echolalia delicately hold the slow melodic interchanges at focal point throughout, sparing and separated inside a sumptuous architecture. With this at the centre, winded hallucinations of romance and detritus wash everything in sight, spectacularly so – one can’t help but recall late period Labradford, Kranky’s defining 1995-2005 run or the cracked, playful scrubbing of Markus Popp/Robert Lippok/Jan St. Werner’s wild glitch work innovations on Thrill Jockey, et al .
Breathable shreds of vocals veer from the Enya-esque early on to a heightened robotic R&B breakdown as the album arcs downward, guitars alternate between free venting and fragmented FX jam ups, translucent sheets of synth padding careen past desolately like cars at night. Straus’ knack for skittering fungified concrete, croaks of ring modulation and the unwieldy resonances of dropped equipment skirt Fukuzumi’s redacted downtuned plinths, in a semi-lucid diorama of abandoned truckstop melancholy.
So what then makes this sound so inherently modern if these gilded touchstones of the early 21st Century ring true? Firstly to my mind, ideas about the punctuative use of deep bass wells are a hallmark of certain millennial trends, which the pair certainly employ here in a remarkably functional sense to crest through numerous moments grazing the brink of saccharine. Secondly, the way in which vocals are treated and audibly digitised – edited into indecipherable, re-pitched, non-literal texts.
The dichotomy of the latter possibly being at odds with an “earnestness” agenda by saying almost nothing is tempered by the objective of replicating a feeling – being moved by the non-literal. How does one describe this with as little tangible language as possible? How do you paint a momentary rushing chemical?
‘It Means A Lot’ is scheduled for release on 17th April. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
TRACKLIST
1. dumb rain
2. room core
3. sad bowl
4. lame mart
5. pm filter
6. double carmen
7. kind zo
8. jesses car