Ulaan Passerine – The Landscape of Memory (2017)

Review: Consistency can get you taken for granted. Who calls their friends because Richard Thompson played another great guitar solo? Steven R. Smith has had to manage that risk for years. The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist has been making music in a small room in his house since the latter part of the 1990s, when he first differentiated his solo work from what he played in Mirza and (a bit later) Thuja. The essentials have been the same from the start. Smith layers instruments, including familiar tools of rock and one-offs of his own design, into evocative, evolving melodic sequences that give you a feeling that you’re somewhere else. The location and the vibe that goes with it might vary; under the name Hala Strana, he made music that made you feel like you were walking into some 19th century eastern European village, and everything around you was in black and white, while Ulaan Khol evoked the same pit of hell as Keiji Haino does in full-on rage mode. Ulaan Markhor rumbles like Crazy Horse trying to be Booker T. & the MGs, and records made under Smith’s own name are a grab bag of experimentation; he even sings on one of them. But you can always be sure that Smith will steep the music with so much feeling and atmosphere that you’ll feel irrevocably touched by it. In recent years Smith’s most frequent handle is Ulaan Passerine. Googling the name’s components will only get you so far, but they distinguishing quality of Smith’s work under that name is patient craft. Some of his work has been as unbridled as a volcanic eruption, as rough as unfinished wood, or as ramshackle as that great, lost soundtrack that Swell Maps did for Béla Tarr. But while you will hear hints of such effects in Ulaan Passerine’s pieces, which usually span the length of a tape or LP side, they are fixed into larger frameworks that are as perfectly joined and smoothly varnished as the work of some master carpenter. “The Landscape of Memory” opens with a patiently strummed 12-string guitar and muted drums, then swells and broadens in short order, carried by massed strings and a foregrounded spike fiddle whose coarseness contrasts exquisitely with the smoother sounds around it. Then most of the instruments give way to a distant drone, which gives you pause and sets you up for a guitar passage as melancholy as your favorite late-night Neil Young tune. This is classic soundtrack of the mind stuff, vivid enough that it would scare many a filmmaker who would hear this music and ask, “Where am I going to find sights as strong as these sounds?” Which may be the reason why Smith, after 20-odd years, hasn’t scored a film yet. And maybe he never will, but that won’t be a tragedy, because a great flick awaits anytime he puts out a record, you put it on, and close your eyes while it plays. — dusted

Track List: 01. The Landscape of Memory [17:48] 02. Pomegranate Wine [19:07]

Media Report: Genre: ambient, post-rock Origin: USA
Format: FLAC Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec Bit rate mode: Variable Channel(s): 2 channels Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz Bit depth: 16 bits Compression mode: Lossless Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)

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