Ultramarine / Interiors
The title of our latest release from Ultramarine, Interiors, may have a topical resonance for many listeners who have found themselves in involuntary confinement during the year or so, but the five tracks on this EP were actually recorded in 2011, and they represent a significant opening out of the duo’s evolving musical perspective.
Four of the five tracks that feature on our 12” vinyl release were issued digitally in 2020. But as Paul Hammond has pointed out, “with Ultramarine, the whole point is to create an artefact, so the form and the look of the finished product is central.” That’s an outlook shared passionately by Blackford Hill, and the music now available on this vinyl record is appropriately enhanced with cover art by printmaker Katherine Jones. Her imagery matches the music neatly in its nuanced interplay of solidity and shadow, line and colour, geometric form and organic growth.
Ian Cooper and Paul Hammond, who had become friends while growing up together in the Essex countryside, formed Ultramarine in 1989. Throughout the 90s their distinctive music, an enticing blending of acoustic with electronic instruments, secured a loyal following and won critical acclaim. Then, throughout the whole of the next decade, Ultramarine lay dormant. Interiors documents their reawakening, with Cooper and Hammond exploring approaches to music-making made possible by recently developed software, designed specifically with live performance in mind.
Ultramarine returned refreshed in October 2011, bursting back into public awareness with Find A Way, issued as a 7” single on their own label, Real Soon. Clive Bell, writing in The Wire, extolled its engaging mix of electronic beats with cool vocals and tropical percussion. More generally, Bell embraced Ultramarine’s thoughtful hybrid electronica as “music you could enjoy at home without feeling your intelligence was being scorned, or that if you were not physically in a club, you were wasting your time.”
On Interiors, the roots of that slinky single are laid bare on the purely instrumental track Find A Way Back. Its two distinct parts stretch out the beats and flaunt those tropical flourishes, shuffling and flexing, vibrant and heady, languid and sultry. This is techno filtered through the fabric of magic realism, an exotically spiced concoction, chilled and ready to be savoured at home.
With the diagrammatic clarity of its punchy thrust and spooling loops, Even When distils the essence of Cooper and Hammond’s way of working with their musical material: layering and shaping, nurturing textures, plaiting rhythms and juggling accents. The cumulative impact is almost sculptural in its physical immediacy and looming presence. In contrast, on By Return, the duo skew the outcome, projecting a selection of limber figures into dub’s auditory hall of mirrors. They are clearly revelling in the reverb, relishing the recoil and decay.
Interiors ultimately opens out onto Decoy Point (Version). With its ozone saturated ambience, this closing track evokes marshland and mudflat soundscapes, seabird mews, maritime signals and tidal wash. Cooper and Hammond feel a deep attachment to the Essex landscape and, in particular, to the local history and physical features of the Blackwater estuary. Blackford Hill provides an accommodating home for Ultramarine’s ongoing project Blackwaterside, which has featured to date a 7” vinyl record plus 28-page booklet, and a photo film with soundtrack. Now, delving into the Ultramarine archive, this welcome incarnation
“Hammond and Cooper sound utterly at ease and lucid, expressing their musical ideas with startling dexterity. If this was indeed the sound of a group re-connecting with their craft, then they made the return to the studio sound effortless”
“For many, Ultramarine represent the gentler kind of 90s indie-dance crossover encapsulated on their breakthrough album Every Man And Woman Is A Star. But Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper’s collaborative project has been more varied than that one album, previously tilted towards industrial and shoegaze before edging towards a bubbly kind of braindance-electro and intimate, off-centre deep house. Since starting out in 1989 their activity has gone through understandable ebbs and flows, but the past decade has yielded a steady flow of material which now comfortably folds their previous styles into a sound defined more by cosy atmospheres and lilting, organic experimentation than any particular genre.
During a period of reawakening around 2011, Hammond and Cooper were shifting their focus towards this new direction in which the joins between live instruments, samples and synthesis became very hard to discern. They returned with the double-dose of the Find A Way and Acid / Butch singles, but there was of course more material from this period which never got committed to wax. During the ritual housekeeping of 2020’s lockdown which many artists undertook, Ultramarine presented some additional pieces from that period as the digital-only Interiors release, and now Blackford Hill have pressed those tracks plus an additional demo.
There’s something truly exquisite about Ultramarine in this period – the sound of a group so at ease with their direction and methodology the music seems to positively flow from their fingers. From post-rock guitar treatments and dub mixing desk flair to voluptuous house-geared synthesis and outernational rhythmic passages, the tracks on Interiors have the quality of a rich stew bursting with flavours given enough time to blend to perfection. Whether slinking towards a drum machine beat on Find A Way Back or revelling in hazy downtempo reveries on Decoy Point (Version), Hammond and Cooper sound utterly at ease and lucid, expressing their musical ideas with startling dexterity. If this was indeed the sound of a group re-connecting with their craft, then they made the return to the studio sound effortless.” OLI WARWICK / JUNO RECORDS / DECEMBER 2021