Friday, April 1, 2022 - 8:00pm

FENNESZ
Using a filtered and treated electric guitar as the starting point for his lush soundscapes, Fennesz has created a personal and groundbreaking discourse throughout his career. Perhaps sculpting the last truly unique vision for the guitar, his luminant compositions are anything but sterile experiments. Fennesz’s world of sound unfolds and resembles sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. In addition to his prolific output as a solo artist, and his ongoing investigation of the limits of noise, automatic composition, field music or contemporary classical, Fennesz is also a frequent collaborator with other luminaries of the scene. These include artists such as Alva Noto, Oren Ambarchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keith Rowe, Peter Rehberg, David Sylvian, and Jim O’Rourke.
ULLA
Ulla roots her style in improvised jazz and blues on a very welcome follow-up to her sublime ‘Tumbling Towards A Wall’ LP.
Ulla offers more precious room to breathe and space to think on ‘Limitless Frame’, dispensing a broader palette of instrumentation to evoke finer, ephemeral feels with a more timeless appeal. Her sound appears more porous to influence from strains of wistful jazz and blues here, vacillating and morphing her dreamlike ambient purview between parts of signature, aleatoric ambient pads and rustling room recordings, along with more classicist or traditionalist turns of guitars, sax and keys that call to mind K. Leimer via The Remote Viewer. It’s a perhaps surprising change in the winds of her music, and one we’re very happy to follow.
In the artist’s own words “I made this music as a way to hug myself” and listeners can trust that hug will extend to them, too. She spends the first half of the record wrapping us up in clouds of pads, processed strums and fractured melodies, whisked to a gentle peak in the keening swoon of ‘Chest of Drawers’ around the middle, while the second half unravels into gorgeous loner arrangements. She captures the most wistful sensations akin to Annie Hogan’s parlour keys on ‘Something Inside My Body’, and crystalline trickles of guitars in ‘Clearly The Memory’, with the softly pealing wind of ‘Walk Alone’ calling to mind Loren Connors and Daniel Carter’s ‘The Departing of A Dream.’