About

Ultramarine have always seemed to exist slightly outside their time. Their 1989 debut EP, Wyndham Lewis, incorporated recordings of the work of Lewis, the futurist painter and writer who died three decades earlier. And where their first album, 1990’s Folk, bore certain hallmarks of its era—a mix of breakbeats, funk bass, and keening saxophone, embedded within groove-heavy, sampledelic post-punk—subsequent albums ventured further afield. Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper made good on the promise of what Simon Reynolds called “pastoral techno”: an unorthodox fusion of sleek machine funk with woolly jazz, wonky soul, and occasional vocals from Robert Wyatt, an iconoclastic legend of the Canterbury scene. Signals Into Space, only their second album in two decades, distills elements that have always been present in Ultramarine’s music into a potent new brew.

Their sound is more refined than ever, but it’s hard to put your finger on what, exactly, that sound is. Warm, liquid synths and gently pulsing grooves scan as ambient, but vintage drum machines add teeth. The tone of the electric bass, muscular but understated, flashes to Tortoise’s spacious brand of post-rock. The watercolor wash of Ric Elsworth’s vibraphone and the searching saxophone of Iain Ballamy (a member of the group Food, with multiple albums for ECM and Rune Grammofon to his name) nod to ethereal jazz. The most fitting tag might be “Balearic,” given the album’s drowsy drift; there’s even a sample of a 1983 song by Orquesta de las Nubes, Suso Sáiz’s balmily experimental Spanish group. Ultramarine call Signals Into Space—composed in a small, windowless room in an industrial complex in their native Essex—“an escapist record.” But it’s no mere pastiche of palm trees and Mediterranean tides. Its effects are more complex, even contradictory—a picture of white-sand beaches superimposed on dull cement walls, a dream of summer bundled in heavy down. Atmospheric and skeletal, their music projects outward yet turns inward.