Signals into Space

Nearly 30 years after Folk, their debut long-player, Essex duo Ultramarine return to Les Disques du Crépuscule for Signals Into Space, their seventh album. Though hardly prolific, this outfit has been remarkably consistent. They delivered the classic Every Man and Woman Is a Star in 1992, an exercise in blissy, home-listening electronica. It was followed in 1993 with a seamless meld of prog, Celtic folk, jazz, and ambient on United Kingdoms -- with Canterbury rock legend Robert Wyatt guesting on vocals. Ultramarine issued two more albums (and a slew of EPs, including Hymn Remixes with Lol Coxhill and Kevin Ayers), before going on hiatus until 2013 when they re-emerged with the lovely This Time Last Year.
Signals Into Space is what you'd expect from Ultramarine: it's airy, spacy, and pillowy, and its textures frame unassuming loops colored with synthetic and organic rhythms, carefully arranged reeds, winds, stacked keyboards, and samplers. The American singer/songwriter Anna Domino -- whose recordings on Les Disques du Crepuscule and Factory inspired the lads early on -- co-wrote and sings on four tunes. Ian Cooper and Paul Hammond spent three years working in a cramped, windowless studio, creating tracks that traveled outside their enclosed surroundings, alternately evoking visions of nighttime beaches, sun-scorched deserts, pastoral country landscapes, and steamy jungles. To that end, they also enlisted jazz percussionist & vibraphone player Ric Elsworth, saxophonist Iain Ballamy (Loose Tubes, Food, Quercus).
Opener "Elsewhere" is a drifting instrumental pregnant with minor-key melody, mode, and economical harmony; rhythms wheel through and around their sumptuous mix. Domino and Ballamy come together on "Arithmetic," where dubby club jazz, angular Prince-esque pop, and spindly Anglo funk collide with psychedelic effects, trippy echoes, and multivalently layered percussion, with organs and electronic pianos exchanging pulses amid the loops and beats in the foreground. That dubwise quotient meets Ballamy's improvising as tenor sax and jagged synth chords introduce Domino, who relates a nearly perverse tale of technology and intimacy. Sampled handclaps, bass loops, and chunky guitars expand the striated cadence into a nocturnal drift of sonic inquiry. "Breathing" features Ballamy's sax amid disembodied spoken male vocals, a South African chorale, and a polyrhythmic Latin groove. "Equatorial Clams" waxes and wanes with digitally delayed sax, spidery Wurlitzer chords, and skeletal rhythms framing elegant, fingerpicked guitars. Ultimately, despite its abundant strangeness, Signals Into Space is almost bucolic in its charm, but it is also ringed inside dark, modal margins on tracks such as the spacy club-jazz of "Sleight of Hand" and the loopy juxtaposition of electronic abstraction and humid techno grooves in closer "Cross Reference." While there isn't anything revolutionary, or even new, here, Ultramarine focus on what they do best with canny songwriting, deft arranging, and sumptuous but unassuming production techniques that evince something so aurally attractive, reinvention is unnecessary. ~ Thom Jurek