Distance generates yearning. Ulla and Perila have been making music together for years, split between Philadelphia and Berlin, like two moons orbiting the same sonic planet. Jazz Plates finally brings the duo into the same room together, letting them luxuriate in mutual presence and exploration over two discs. It’s unhurried and effortless.
While this is technically their third full-length together, it is the first they have made in complete spectral congruence. Records like LOG ET3RNAL and blue heater felt like extensions of the communities in which they were surrounded—West Mineral Ltd. and its mastermind Brian Leeds, the Berlin-based ambient-by-way-of-splatter-painting label 3XL, and, of course, each other. The oceanic gap between them was shrunk to the size of Perila’s bedroom, recorded in person and, Perila says, “in one breath.” Both artists, together and apart, are obsessed with space. United at last, they abandon blissful beauty for strange pockets of noise and harmony, overlaid in fascinatingly peculiar fashion.
Jazz Plates sounds nothing like anything they’ve made before, even recently. It synthesizes the lo-fi solo guitar proclivities of Perila’s set me free into the Red Room-esque blues dirge of “cheese homework;” the glitchy hymns of It Means a Lot, Ulla’s record with Ultrafog, shapeshift into crackling, membranous jazz on “a josh outside the window.” Clarinet, cooing vocals, plaintive chords, and the sounds of logs and leaves swirl together as though independent of their creators. “glass containers,” the album’s longest track, is the pinnacle of the first half, a snow-capped peak peering from behind a horizon of rain-drenched conifers. Nomadic melodies dissipate rather than decisively end. Relishing the way the sounds unravel, the players simply hear the music in front of them and respond, finding conversational discovery in real time and creating intimate and hopeful atmospheres.
Heavier sounds and ghostly approximations of percussion hesitate to appear until the C-side. Easing in with the morosely haunting “swӓb,” Ulla and Perila resist whatever beauty they had found previously, consumed by oppressive static and trapped within the room’s four walls. Multi-tracked vocals float by like wisps of fog, and the pointed sounds of guitar and bass clash as they soundtrack the nothingness that fills every inch. But even the harshest sounds are tempered by lighter elements: laughter rises above the noise of “cheese homework,” serving as a reminder of the duo’s joy as they craft these soundscapes.
It’s difficult to sustain tension and momentum over 67 minutes of such unstructured music. The variety from track to track is subtle: The clarinet takes marginally different paths; beats take shape out of distorted thuds or drops of rain. Jazz Plates starts as an empty room before folding in on itself over and over again, like infinite interior-design origami. Despite an ending doused in anti-climax, Ulla and Perila craft a space that facilitates wonder. Ambient has a reputation as wallpaper music, but Jazz Plates is more reminiscent of the dust on the shelf, the rain on the windowpane, and the company kept that makes the space bearable, perhaps even beautiful.
