The artist known until now as Ulla, or Ulla Straus, makes music so delicate it’s almost weightless, propelled less by a guiding hand than by the mercurial drift of air particles warmed by the first rays of the sun. At their gentlest, Ulla’s ambient miniatures seem to consist of little more than a soft breeze brushing against guitar strings, or dust motes settling between the keys of the synthesizer.
Ulla’s public profile is just as inconspicuous. Moving between Kansas, California, Pennsylvania, and Germany, they have slipped often between aliases (Foamy, Pepper) and coyly named collaborative projects (sofa, wiggle room, LOG). One early moniker, Ulla Anona, came with an implicit suggestion of secrecy. Now they’re just U.e., on a new label—their own?—called 28912, which might be a date, or a zip code, or maybe a combination scribbled on a faded Post-it, the lock in question long since lost or rusted shut. The mysteriousness of their music invites such speculations.
Hometown Girl is as quiet as anything Ulla has done until now, but an important shift has taken place. Instead of the softly burbling electroacoustic sound design of Tumbling Towards a Wall or the intricate digital swirls of foam, the new album foregrounds an almost purely acoustic palette: clean-toned guitar; woodwinds laid on like strips of cotton batting; watery piano, redolent of mildew and mothballs, with the creaky beach-house vibe of Grouper’s Ruins. Ulla even plays drums on a few songs, tapping away at the cymbals and toms with slow, careful movements.
This isn’t the first time Ulla has worked with acoustic materials. Sax and piano wandered through Limitless Frame’s lonely hallways, and guitar, piano, and voice were at the root of foam’s glitchy catalysis. But this is the first time the artist has sounded virtually unplugged. On previous albums, the instrumental touches often wore the telltale marks of digital manipulation; here, Ulla might as well be laying down parts on a thrifted Tascam Portastudio. You can sense the fingers on the strings, the dimensions of the room, the blankets draped in lieu of soundproofing. On “Gecko,” a voice that darts out from behind strummed guitar sounds less like singing than a private, spontaneous vocalization, like Keith Jarrett murmuring absent-mindedly at his piano.
That sense of presence is partly illusory, a product of the record’s low-key production trickery. On “Little Window,” which features the album’s first real singing, their voice arrives wreathed in reverb, as though they were singing from the other end of an underpass. The a cappella “Song for Hill,” just a minute long, might be a phone recording of a lullaby captured through the bedroom wall. And a few tracks melt blissfully into the digital haze of their earlier work: “Drain the House” comes on in rolling, bass-heavy waves of ambience, while “Froggy Explorer” and “Night Loop” recall Fennesz’s stompbox meditations, scraps of guitar caught like flotsam in the digital tide. But the overall impression is a kind of lo-fi Talk Talk, every element quietly holding its own in a candle-lit room; or the casual, congenial vibe of G.S. Schray, K. Freund, and the ambient-jazz jam sessions of the Akron scene.
What makes all this hush meaningful, and not simply pleasant, is the depth of feeling they bring to these pieces and their extended reverie. The mood will probably depend upon your own: meditative, wistful, rapturous, peaceful, hopeful, heartbroken—there is room for all these emotions, in all their shades, flickering uncertainly as they jostle together. That the lyrics are often half unintelligible matters little; in “Drawing of Me,” I may lose the thread after “All that’s lost now” and “Might as well try to,” but the graceful little fillip in their voice captures more than any couplet could on its own.
For all Hometown Girl’s modest trappings, lo-fi doesn’t mean ramshackle. This is careful, considered music; just listen to the subtle curlicues of clarinet, or the loving care with which they apply layer after protective layer of woodwinds. Lo-fi has a slacker reputation, but there is nothing slack about these exquisitely rendered songs. The humility of their materials belies their emotional riches.
