If you follow Steven R. Smith’s music, it’s always tempting to draw inferences from the name on the record’s sleeve. He’s recorded under a series of guises (Ulaan Kohl, Hala Strana, Ulaan Markhor), and the name often suggests a particular angle on his long-standing practice of making music at home that makes your mind take a trip. But the divisions are starting to blur. While Olive was made under his own name, its toolkit corresponds closely to the one he used on Ulaan Passerine’s Dawn. On both, his organ contests with his electric guitar for dominance, and the drums tend to be well down in the mix. And on both, he uses horn section sourced from sympathetic corners scattered around the world. In fact, it’s mostly the same players on both records.
But if the tools are the same, the question presents, how is he using them? The paradox of Olive is that while Smith is an auteur whose sound is pretty identifiable from project to project, and that does not change on this recording, it admits an unusual degree of outside input. Not only does it feature a couple of keyboards and six reed and brass instruments contributed by players scattered across Europe and the USA; they’re often at the center of the action. “Across The Boulevard” gets its payoff from the way João Sousa’s bold trumpet yields to Yvonne Sone’s diffusing organ. Likewise, on “Passing Winter,” it’s the transition from Filippo Tramontana’s laconic French horn to Kate Wright’s (yes, of Movietone) piano and field recordings that’ll activate private cinematic visions. While Smith gets some cool licks in, such as the organ line that stretches across brassy harmonies on “Trees At North Branch,” the focus is on arrangements that he might have devised, but could not play on his own. His ability to make you imagine a world is undimmed, but now he’s letting representatives from around the world add finishing touches.
Ulaan Passerine — New Evening (Worstward Recordings)
The spike fiddle
New Evening by Ulaan Passerine
Steven R. Smith has made a lot of records. This may seem a matter of necessity, since most of them come out in small numbers. But the necessity that they express is probably not economic; let’s be real, most people putting out LPs in pressings of a few hundred could probably make more money mowing their neighbors’ lawns than they will by making another record. It’s more likely that Smith makes music that wants to be made, or at least that he likes the process of making it enough to keep beavering away in a back room of his Los Angeles house after twenty years.
And it also seems to be the case that Smith makes records with particular ends in mind. One way to decode his intent is to note the name under which the music is released. Each recording alias has its own recording methodology, and Ulaan Passerine is the one where he pulls it all together. UP pieces tend to emphasize melody over distortion, and they usually span the available space of the analog format (cassette or LP) that bears them. New Evening comprises two side-long tracks, “Evening” and “Dawning.” The two compositions are made up of shorter passages, which melt in and out of each other like dissolving film images.
Each smaller section showcases one of Smith’s homemade instruments. These devices crop up on a lot of his records, and they contribute to the aura of distance and unfamiliarity that makes his music so compelling. If you hear something that sounds like a violin, it’s probably a spike fiddle made from a gourd and a neck fretted with paper clips. That thing you think is a bass? That’s the spike cello. That eerie dissolving sound might be the baritone psaltery, which is made partly from pencils and floor molding trim. These instruments aren’t just playthings; they’re practical solutions to Smith’s need for sounds that he can’t get with an electric guitar or a drum kit. But New Evening is the first record made exclusively with them. If he didn’t tell us, we probably wouldn’t know; this music is very much in line with the melancholy reveries found on other Ulaan Passerine records. But that’s not a problem at all. Rather, it’s evidence that Smith’s been working toward ends that transcend mere displays of musicianship all along, and that he’s done it again.
A name can be a restrictive prescription, or it can be a license. In a career that spans a quarter century and a variety of artistic appellations, Steven R. Smith has had it both ways. His Hala Strana handle was so specifically associated with music that projected an aura of Eastern European melancholy that when he exhausted that line of inquiry, he retired the name. Ulaan Passerine, on the other hand, is more flexible. Under that banner, the Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist has made recordings devoted entirely to home-made instruments and to longer-duration compositions that make full use of Smith’s gear locker.
Dawn distils the banner’s potentialities. Each of its eight pieces contains concentrates the atmosphere it evokes, both in method and material. Smith has a gift for crafting tunes that take you somewhere, and adorning them in ways that will populate the resulting imagined spaces with images and incidents. Dawn’s tunes are more eventful, their arrangements more layered with contrasting actions like the Pops Staples-meets Richard Thompson lick that rises out of a subliminal blur on “A Calvary of Clouds,” than those on New Evening or The Landscape Memory.
The album also pushes further into territory hinted at on earlier UP recordings. Organ and mellotron draw melodic contours that have previously been carried by stringed instruments, and a four-piece horn section brings color and delicacy to passages that might previously have been hewn more roughly. But there’s never so much going on that the music might clog up the passageway from your speaker cones to your subconscious. Each melodic gesture lasts long enough to transport you, but not so long that you want to get off the road. Each transitional device imparts a hint of mystery before stepping aside, so that the album’s relatively short pieces flow together like a pair of side-long suites. If music is your vehicle for getting to a better place, Smith’s remain hands you’ll want to have on the steering wheel.
I never lock up my money, for Ive got I must have some from there. And this indecision seemed to bleed him of his. No, he said, turn against you. Then to come back to Tevershall and go as. Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating. Wells cleared his throat and remarked drily Are you first led worstward ho to suspect the fact. But it would have been suicide, mon ami. The next day, they descended at the tiny railway uneasiness in the middle of the room. You dont mind, do you.
