(04.11.09) Ultre is Finn McNicholas, UK experimental homespun electro-acoustic po-mo B-boy, and The Nest & The Skull is a heady sound-trip on which grainy swirls of manipulated acoustic guitars consort with violins and cellos over stuttering beats. Sheffield’s Audiobulb label is nothing if not eclectic, and in this respect Ultre could be seen as its flagship act, drawing as it does on the strategies of diversification patented by the likes of MoM and Fourtet. McNicholas, self-proclaimed abstainer from samples and presets, eschews DSP for live recording captures, preferring to use homemade means to achieve ends similar to laptop-toting brothers, the result coming out with a filmy scuzzed-up patina suggesting a vintage recording.
“Favourite Mammal” sets the tone with a Mush-y kind of post-BoC folk-tinged hiphop-tronica (or is that hiphop-tinged folk-tronica?), guitar taking a funky-strummer lead, asissted by a scrunched up array of percussives and beat boxisms. Thereafter the likes of “Dead Words” and “To All the Laughing You Will Never Do” are similarly whirling dervish electro-acoustic funk simulacra with thrumming beat-assists. A number of tracks, not least “Ridicule and Self-Ridicule,” suggest that the fractured beats and filtered guitar harmonies of Prefuse 73 as the main influencing blueprint for Ultre’s expansions, though the album takes something of a divergent turn with some late-appearing grandiose compressed orchestrations (“To All The Laughing You Will Never Do” and the closing “A House Under Your Head”).
This all works well enough in sequences of two or three tracks, especially on individual songs like “Peace Corpse,” with its flurry of half-erased melodies and visceral drums, Spanish guitar flourishes meshing with the fizz of his string-strums. Rhythms stagger and lurch, gather momentum, only to falter. Sounds are pre-stressed and etiolated, bleached out here, over-amplified, zoomed-in there. Melodies appear to take shape then dissolve or morph into recursive tropes. So while each track in isolation offers a distracting enough freeplay of gristly acoustics and fluid electronics, the overall effect of the album’s progression is somewhat cloying. With a parade of largely similar sound sets, the combo of fractured-beats+treated-acoustics begins to sound over-familiar, and the ear gets jaded. That said, McNicholas does create a series of fresh-sounding textural pieces which interestingly juggle chaos and order, squeezing out diverting melodies from heaving texture weaves and kinetic beats.
The Nest And The Skull is out now on Audiobulb. [Purchase / Listen
